i 


^\)e  SabbatI;  i^  |^i5to^y 


Dr.  ISAAC  SCHWAB, 


i 
! 


ST.  JOSEPH,  MO. 


p^j?^:r.t  I. 


ST.   JOSEPH,   MO. 
ST.  JOSEPH   STEAM   PRINTING  CO. 


Copyright,  December,  1888, 

by 

Dr.  Isaac  Schwab. 


PREFACE. 


The  present  work  has  grown  out  of  the  nucleus  of  a  few 
articles  contributed  to  a  Jewish  Weekly.  It  has  now 
assumed  the  dimension  of  a  book,  in  which  form  it  is  and 
will  further  be  given  to  the  world.  The  author  has,  for 
several  reasons,  seen  fit  to  publish  the  first  part  separately 
at  present,  and  let  the  remainder  follow  in  a  short  time. 
Whether  this  will  be  divided  into  two  more  parts,  or  appear 
at  once  in  one  volume,  will  be  decided  hereafter.  In  the 
sequel  of  the  present  publication  the  author  deals  with  the 
following  subjects  :  The  Sabbath  with  Jesus,  as  to  doctrine 
and  practice ;  the  Sabbath  in  the  Apostolic  age  ;  the  Sab- 
bath with  the  Jewish  Christian  sects,  the  Nazarenes  and 
Ebionites ;  the  Sabbath  in  Pauline  and  Gentile  Christianity. 

The  object  he  has  in  view  in  putting  his  work  before  a 
larger  public  is  twofold,  religious  and  scientific.  The  Sab- 
bath, most  sacred  as  it  is  in  its  significance,  and  as  yet 
theoretically  planted  hard  and  fast  in  the  consciousness  of 
the  generality  of  Israel  as  the  '*  perpetual  sign  between 
them  and  God,"  has  yet  practically  lost  in  modern  days 
much  of  its  pristine  awfulness,  and  even  of  the  fervid  rev- 
erence paid  to  it  in  ages  not  so  long  gone  by.  Notwith- 
standing that  it  is  yet  generally  exalted  as  a  prominently 
distinctive  mark  of  Judaism,  and  valued  as  one  of  the  few 
remaining  bonds  of  Israel's  union,  it  is  alas!  too  often  made 
to  yield  to  the  so-called  pressure  of  modern  business  rela- 
tions, and  thus  compromised  as  to  its  sanctity  and  validity; 
or  it  is  paltered  with  and  bartered  away  on  various  grounds 
of  expediency.     On  these  painful  issues  of  modern  Judaism 


385162 


6  '  .    "PREFACE. 

we  cannot  here  dwell.  It  lies  moreover  beyond  the  purpose 
of  these  prefatory  lines  to  find  fault  and  point  out  the  dif- 
ferent manifest  decrease  of  true  attachment  for  the  Sabbath 
in  our  day. 

The  writer  is,  on  the  whole,  aiming  at  and  inspired  by 
the  hope  of  quickening  again,  by  the  light  of  historical 
data  witnessing  to  an  incomparable  self-devotion  and 
loyalty  of  Israel  in  the  past  to  the  royal  bride  Sabbath,  that 
sense  of  superior  estimation  of  this  sacred  day,  which  should 
be  the  pride  and  glory  of  our  people  at  the  present,  no  less 
than  it  was  in  previous  times.  He  aims  to  rekindle,  by  the 
various  illustrations  put  forth  in  his  work,  a  zealous  concern 
for  the  Sabbath  of  the  Decalogue  in  the  minds  of  those, 
with  whom  it  has  slacked  through  an  undue  addiction  to 
worldly  things  and  business  advantages,  and  to  possibly 
arrest  the  Neshamah  yetherah  "additional  soul,"  formerly 
so  closely  attending  the  Israelite  on  the  Sabbath,  on  its 
sorrowful  flight  from  those  too  deeply  immersed  in  their 
temporal  pursuits  and  the  material  strifes  of  our  racing  age, 
or  those  too  flightily  temporizing  in  their  attitude  towards 
the  "sign"  that  is  to  be  "perpetual,"  and  on  the  perpetuity 
of  which  our  forefathers,  as  well  of  the  middle  ages  as  of 
antiquity  (Jewish  new-Christians  of  Spain,  who  would  con- 
tinue to  observe  the  Sabbath  secretly  despite  the  baptism 
forced  on  them,  were  by  the  inquisitors  singled  out  by  the 
observation,  from  elevated  places,  that  no  smoke  came  out 
of  their  houses  on  the  Sabbath,  even  in  rigorous  winter  ; 
see  'Shebhet  Jehudah,'  p.  96),  staked  their  lives  from  their 
spontaneous  piety  and  faithfulness  to  the  Law. 

On  his  scientific  purpose  the  author  need  not  spend  many 
words.  No  production  in  any  department  of  science, 
resulting  from  an  aspiration  to  enrich,  in  some  way  and 
measure,  the  extant  stores  of  knowledge,  requires  an  apology 
for  itself.  In  the  domain  of  the  intellect  every  original 
literary  creation,  or  only  newly  arranged  and  explained 
subject-matter,  justifies  itself,  even  without  the  grounded 
prospect  of  its  meeting  a  certain  desideratum.  How  much 
more  warranted  is  an  attempt,  like  our  own,  by  which  a  real 
want,  however  moderately,  is  to  be  supplied  ! 


PREFACE.  7 

For  it  will  be  allowed  by  all,  that  a  thorough-going 
research  into  the  observance  of  the  Sabbath  by  our  ances- 
tors in  the  historical  ages  of  the  second  Commonwealth  ; 
also  into  the  opinions  which  prevailed  in  antiquity  among 
non-Jews  upon  the  Jewish  religion,  and  the  Sabbath  in  par- 
ticular ;  furthermore,  into  the  mode  of  the  Sabbatic  rest 
and  the  theories  held  on  it  by  the  chief  persons  of  primitive 
Christianity,  and,  in  general,  by  the  various  parties  of  the 
ancient  Jewish  Christian  Church ;  and,  lastly,  into  the 
position  which  the  earlier  and  later  Gentile  Christians  of 
those  remote  ages  held  towards  the  Sabbath,  has  thus  far 
not  been  brought  to  light  in  any  comprehensive  literary 
effort.  The  author's  relative  investigations  and  his  resolve  to 
step  before  the  world  with  their  result,  will  therefore,  he 
expects,  be  acknowledged  as  a  timely  attempt. 

As  to  the  historical  merits  of  his  work,  also  its  tone  and 
diction,  he  trusts  that  critics  will  pass  on  them  with  fairness 
and  forbearance.  The  shortcomings  that  may  strike  them 
at  its  perusal,  may  be  manifold,  but  they  will  not  likely  be 
found  as  originating  from  any  haste  or  forwardness  in  form- 
ing or  proposing  his  arguments,  for  he  presumes  to  rank 
himself  among  the  very  cautious  reasoners,  which  circum- 
stance, too,  accounts  for  his  rare  literary  appearance  before 
the  public. 

May  Providence  speed  his  work,  and  vouchsafe  that  it 
accomplish  its  combined  instructive  and  religiously  restor- 
ative purpose. 

May  the  Sabbath,  that  priceless  gem  in  the  crown  of  the 
Torah,  again  become  as  bright  with  the  lustre  of  Israel's 
spontaneous  devotion  to  it,  as  it  was  of  yore.  May  the 
reverence  for  it,  blended  with  the  reverence  for  the  memo- 
ries of  our  martyrs  of  the  past,  who  endured  tortures  or 
offered  up  life  in  its  honor  and  for  the  "sanctification  of 
God,"  be  profoundly  reanimated  in  us,  and  help  promoting 
in  our  midst  an  untarnished  life  of  holiness. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE. 
CHAPTER   I. 

From  Nehemiah  to  the  Age  of  the  Antonines ii 

CHAPTER   II. 
Pag^an  Writers  on  the  Jewish  Religion  atTd  the  Sabbath 22 

CHAPTER   III. 

Pagan  Writers  on  the  Jewish  Religion  and  the  Sabbath 31 

CHAPTER   IV. 

Roman  Writers  on  the  Jewish  Sabbath 72 

Notes  to  these  Chapters 85-132 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

CHAPTER  I. 

FROM   NEHEMIAH   TO   THE   AGE   OF   THE   ANTONINES. 

The  stern  and  striking  reproof  which  Nehemiah,  the 
governor  appointed  by  Artaxerxes  Longimanus  over 
Judea,  dealt,  on  his  second  return  from  Persia,  about  425  B. 
C,  to  the  municipal  authorities  of  the  province  for  the 
violation  of  the  Sabbath,  with  which  he  met  not  only  in 
the  city  of  Jerusalem,  but  in  various  towns  of  Judea,  and 
in  especial,  his  vigilant  measure  of  closing  the  gates  of  the 
capital  against  any  traffic  on  the  sacred  day  of  rest,  seem 
to  have  been  fraught  with  the  best  results.  Ezra,  his  great 
co-laborer  in  the  restoration  of  the  ancient  theocratic  forms 
and'regulations  of  national  religious  life,  had,  it  is  supposed, 
died  during  the  years  of  his  absence.  The  lack  of  an 
energetic  guide  standing  at  the  helm  of  religious  affairs, 
seems  to  have  caused  several  grave  abuses  and  infractions 
of  Law  to  creep  in  and  go  unavenged.  Among  them 
Nehemiah  had  discovered  a  scandalous  dereliction  of  the 
Sabbatic  rest.  Some  of  the  Jews  were  found  by  him  treading 
wine-presses,  and  others  loading  provisions  on  their  wagons 
to  bring  them  to  Jerusalem  (though  they  would  probably  not 
sell  any  before  the  Sabbath  was  over),  and  others  buying 
articles  of  food  and  other  commodities  of  Tyrian  traders 
on  the  Sabbath.  His  authoritative  remonstrance  and  decided 
interference  against  such  profanation  of  the  Sabbath,  are 
recorded  in  Neh.  ch.  xiii.  Thenceforth,  we  justly  suppose, 
the  persuasive  authority  of   the  Sopherim  "  Scribes  "  will 

have  sufficed  to  ward  off  such  flagrant  lawlessness, 

(2; 


12  TA'E  BABBiVTH,  IN  HISTORY. 

These,  composed  of  Temple  functionaries  as  well  as 
learned  persons  from  the  lay  classes  of  Israel,  who  are 
assumed  to  have  begun  their  activity  with  Ezra,  venerated 
in  tradition  as  the  restorer  of  Judaism,  have  made  it  their 
noble  task  to  infuse  a  zealous  spirit  of  religious  life  into  the 
masses,  and  will  doubtless  also  have  largely  contributed 
towards  strengthening  in  their  minds  more  and  more  the 
sense  of  the  sacred  significance  of  the  Sabbath,  by 
expounding  the  Mosaic  Sabbath  ordinances  in  the  public 
devotional  gatherings,  at  first  held  occasionally  and  later 
regularly  on  Sabbaths  and  holy  days,  to  which  were  added 
even  the  Mondays  and  Thursdays,  these  days  being  im- 
proved by  reading  and  commenting  on  the  Law  before  the 
people.  (See  B.  Baba  Kamma  f.  82,  and  comp.  Herzfeld, 
History  of  Israel  i.  28).^  The  work  of  propagating  a 
due  understanding  of  the  Mosaic  enactments  was  carried 
on  by  those  Scribes,  either  as  members  of  an  organized 
body  comprised  in  the  "  Men  of  the  Great  Assembly,"  or 
severally  in  their  capacity  as  copyists,  teachers  and  expos- 
itors of  Scripture. 

The  Sabbath  law  formed  with  them  undoubtedly  a 
prominent  subject  of  interpretation,  for  the  paramount 
sacredness  and  inviolability  with  which  it  is  invested  in  the 
Pentateuch.  The  definition  of  common  labor  prohibited 
on  the  Sabbath,  and  its  classification  into  chief  and  minor 
operations,  was  without  doubt  the  task  those  men  had 
undertaken  in  their  noble  zeal  for  the  advancement  of 
practical  reverence  to  the  ancestral  trust.  Little  by  little 
new  restrictions  were  passed  by  councils  of  the  learned,  to 
serve  as  fences  of  protection  to  the  main  ordinances  of  the 
Sabbath  of  the  Decalogue.  And  they,  too,  coming  from 
the  representative  'Wise,'  were  reverently  heeded  by  the 
bulk  of  the  Jewish  people. 

An  awful  austerity  was  thus,  as  time  progressed,  woven 
around  the  Sabbath,  to  violate  which  was  deemed  a  mark 
of  utter  religious  debasement  and  degeneracy. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  1 3 

For  this  austerity  there  is  historical  evidence  even  out- 
side of  the  Rabbinical  works,  and  for  a  period  as  early  as 
the  first  quarter  of  the  fourth  century  B.  C.  Josephus 
reports,  from  Grecian  histories  that  lay  before  him,  particu- 
larly, it  seems,  the  work  of  Agatharchides  that,  when 
Ptolemy  Lagi  came  with  his  army  to  take  possession  of 
Jerusalem,  but  met  with  determined  resistance  from  the 
inhabitants,  he  purposely  approached  the  city  on  a  Sabbath 
day,  on  which  he  knew  the  Jews  would  not  make  use  of 
arms,  nor  do  any  other  common  work,  and  easily  succeeded 
to  take  it  (Ant.  xii.  i,  i  ;  Against  Apion  i.  22;  see-also 
Herzfeld,  1.  c.  p.  210).  Agatharchides,  like  most  other  Gre- 
cian and  Roman  writers  on  Jewish  religious  institutions, 
could  only  scoff  at  this  conscientious  adherence  of  the  Jews 
to  their  religious  precepts,  which  they  maintained  even  at 
the  risk  of  losing  their  possessions  and  lives.  To  him  this 
custom  of  avoiding  armed  engagements  on  a  Sabbath  was 
another  of  the  superstitions  for  which  he  had  only  scathing 
taunt.  The  Sabbath  observance  of  the  Jews  he  pronounced 
a  "mad  custom,"  a  "foolish  practice."  It  is  likely  that 
Plutarch,-  a  Grecian  writer  of  the  first  and  second  cen- 
turies C.  E.,  in  his  treatise  on  the  "  Fear  of  the  gods,"  or,  as 
it  is  usually  designated,  on  "  Superstition,"  alluded  in  ch. 
viii.  to  that  fact,  when  he,  criticising  a  bootless  piety,  con- 
sisting in  mere  trust  in  Divine  aid  without  that  human 
efforts  to  attain  the  objects  prayed  for  accompany  it,  puts 
forth  as  an  example  of  it  "  the  Jews,  sitting  still,  in 
unbleached  clothes,  because  it  was  the  Sabbath,  and  suffer- 
ing the  enemy  to  plant  ladders  and  seize  upon  the  walls, 
they  themselves  not  rising,  but  remaining  inactive,  like 
(fishes)  in  a  net,  (though)  fettered  only  by  their  super- 
stition." 

In  the  Hibbert  edition  of  that  treatise  the  translator  sug- 
gests in  a  note,  that  Plutarch  had  in  his  mind  another 
event,  that,  namely,  of  the  time  of  the  religious  persecution 
of  Antiochus  Epiphanes,  when  the  Jews  hidden  in  caverns 
of  the  Judean  desert  to  escape  the  miseries  of  the  persecu- 
tion (  the  author  of  2  Mace,  construes  their  object  of  hiding 
there  to  have   been,  that  they  might  "keep  the  Sabbath 


14  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

secretly"),  were  assaulted  by  the  troops  of  the  Syrian 
commander  (  Philippus,  2  Mace. )  on  a  Sabbath,  and  per- 
ished together  at  the  hands  of  the  enemy  ( I  Mace.  ii.  37  ; 
Jos.  Ant.  xii.  6,  2  ). 

He  might  also  have  observed,  as  belonging  to  the  same 
period,  the  like  instance  of  the  resolute  refusal  of  the  Jews 
to  fight  on  the  Sabbath,  when  ApoUonius,  turning  this  day, 
on  which  he  found  the  Jews  at  religious  rest,  to  his  account, 
had  a  large  number  of  them  massacred — an  event  that 
happened  already  before  the  publication  of  Antiochus' 
edict  (2  Mace.  v.  24  sq.)  ;  compare  the  case  narrated  there, 
ch.  XV.,  2-6. 

But  we  have  to  object,  that  the  tenor  of  Plutarch's 
description  comports  decidedly  more  with  the  capture  of 
the  Temple  and  its  fortifications  by  Pompey,  63  B.  C,  when 
he  took  advantage  of  the  Sabbath  days  for  laying  siege  to 
it,  and  raising  and  completing  the  bank,  from  which  he 
would  batter  those  strongholds,  the  Jews  making  no  armed 
opposition,  but  allowing  him  to  proceed  with  his  hostile 
preparations,  rather  than  desecrate  the  day  by  active 
attempts  of  repulsion  (Ant.  xiv.  4,  2  ;  see  also  Wars  ii.  16, 
4).  This  occurrence  was  doubtless  matter  of  record  in 
various  works  of  history,  alongside  the  successful  conquest 
accomplished  by  Pompey,  of  which  an  historian  of  his  acts 
naturally  took  note. 

Be  that  as  it  may,  and  whether  or  not  Plutarch  adverted 
in  his  treatise  to  the  last-named  occurrence,  we  have  at  all 
events  thus  far  adduced  reliable  historical  attestation,  that 
the  Jews  exhibited  from  the  beginning  of  the  Greek  period 
to  that  of  the  Roman  rule  over  Judea,  an  exemplary  pious 
fortitude,  a  true  simplicity  of  faith  (comp.  i  Mace.  ii.  37), 
in  obeying  what  they  were  convinced  to  be  the  law  of  God 
rather  than  the  dictate  of  self-preservation,  otherwise  so 
natural  and  justifiable,  when  it  conflicted  in  their  conscience 
with  the  allegiance  they  felt  themselves  owing  to  their  God. 

It  is  true,  that  the  extreme  rigor  with  regard  to  military 
actions  on  the  Sabbath  was,  since  the  above-mentioned 
calamity  in  the  Syrian  epoch,  somewhat  relaxed  through 
the  intervention  of  Mattathias  and  his  friends,  in  so  far  that 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  I  5 

they  concluded  that  armed  defence  against  hostile  attacks 
did  not  come  under  the  head  of  forbidden  work  (i  Mace.  ii. 
39  sq  ),  and  that,  judging  from  Jonathan,  his  brave  son's 
proceeding  against  Bacchides.(ib.  ix.  43),  and  from  Jose- 
phus'  statement  in  Ant.  xii.  6,  2  ;  xiv.  4,  2,  the  rule  seems 
to  have  prevailed  up  to  the  latter's  time,  that  the  Sabbath 
law  had  to  give  way  before  such  "necessity,"  as  this  historian 
denotes  such  cases  of  critical  extremity.  But,  let  us  reply, 
was  there  nevertheless  not  enough  of  the  former  rigor  left 
even  in  Josephus'  time  .''  He  reflects  in  Ant.  xii.  6,  2,  upon 
the  inactivity  on  Sabbaths  during  Pompey's  invasion  as  not 
only  observed  at  that  juncture,  but  as  still  obtaining  as  a 
rule  in  his  own  day,  in  the  following  :  "The  law  does  not 
permit  us  to  meddle  with  our  enemies  while  they  do  any- 
thing else"  (than  make  a  direct  assault).  Offensive 
warfare  against  pagan  enemies  was  then  practically  shunned 
on  the  Sabbath.  This  shows  conclusively  the  religious 
anxiety  holding  sway  all  along  over  the  consciences  of  the 
Jews,  lest  they  might  transgress  the  Sabbath  law  by  mili- 
tary operations,  although  such  inactivity  might  be  fraught 
with  serious  disadvantages  and  even  losses  to  them.^ 

That  this  anxietj'  was  not  lessened  during  the  centuries 
of  the  Roman  dominion  subsequent  to  Josephus'  time,  may 
be  gathered  from  ancient  Rabbinical  sourzes. 

It  is  known  that  the  Syro-Greek  inhabitants  of  many 
cities  of  Palestme  and  Syria  cherished  an  intense  hatred 
and  bitter  prejudice  against  the  Jews.  Cases  of  mob 
violence  by  the  spiteful  Grecians,  were  specially  frequent 
under  Nero  and  Titus,  (see  Josephus,  Wars  ii,  14,  4  sq ;  20, 
2;  18,  I,  2,  5;  Life  §  5).  That  such  tumults  were  not  only 
fomented  and  enacted  in  larger  cities  having  a  preponderant 
heathen  population,  but  spread  also  among  the  smaller 
places  of  the  surrounding  districts,  we  may  conclude  with 
sufficient  assurance.  The  relations  of  the  Jews  to  the 
Syro-Greeks  in  cities  of  mixed  population  grew  doubtless 
yet  more  strained,  causing  occasional  outbreaks,  since  the 
last  deadly  thrust  was  given  to  the  Jewish  State  by  the 
Roman    colossus,   and  the  disasters   of  the  Jews  attendant 


l6  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

upon  it.  To  the  envy  and  hatred  already  before  nourished 
by  those  fanatical  pagans,  there  was  now  joined  a  vile 
contempt  for  the  humiliated  down-trodden  matron,  Judea. 

As  instances  in  point  may  be  mentioned  the  request  of 
the  heathens  of  Antioch,  the  capital  of  Syria,  to  Titus,  when 
he  bad  come  there  after  the  fall  of  Jerusalem,  to  eject  the 
Jewish  people  from  the  city  (Wars  vii.  5,  2),  where  they 
had  lived  in  large  numbers,  enjoying  since  early  days  equal 
rights  with  the  Greeks  (ib.  3,  3)  ;  also  the  prayer  of  the 
Alexandrians  to  Vespasian  and  Titus  to  take  away  the 
citizenship  from  the  Jews  of  that  city  (Ant.  xii,  3,  i). 

The  Jews  had  through  the  loss  of  their  State  to  the 
Romans  in  that  fatal  revolutionary  struggle  become  strang- 
ers in  their  native  land.  All  that  reminded  them  that  they 
had  some  sort  of  citizenship  left,  was  the  exorbitant  taxa- 
tion levied  on  them  by  the  Roman  authorities.  The  inso- 
lent Roman  soldiers  and  officers,  and  the  malicious  heathen 
inhabitants  of  Palestine  and'  Syria  could  now  with  greater 
impunity  than  ever  before  offer  any  affront  to  the  Jews,  as 
they  were  prostrite  and  discouraged  by  the  disasters 
through  which  they  had  passed.  That  those  heathens  would 
under  such  circumstances  often  attack  the  more  defence- 
less Jews  on  the  Sabbatli,  coming  on  them  unawares  for 
objects  of  molestation,  spoliation  or  murder,  may  be 
derived  by  way  of  induction  from  some  passages  of  the  old 
Rabbinical  literature,  which  we  can  safely  set  down  as 
bearing  on  the  Jewish  affairs  of  the  Roman  period,  at  least 
to  the  latter  part  of  the  second  century  C.  E. 

The  fact  that  Rabbinical  authorities  of  the  first  century 
C.  E.  had  to  legislate  regarding  those  Jews  "  going  out  to 
rescue  brethren  from  the  assaults  of  (  heathen  )  hordes  "  on 
the  Sabbath  (  see  Mishnah  Rosh  Hashanah  ii.  5  and  comp. 
Erubin  iv.  3),  and  that  sundry  regulations  concerning 
warfare  to  repulse  heathen  attacks  on  the  Sabbath  occur  in 
another  Rabbinical  code  (  Tosifta  Erubin  iii.  5  sq.;  comp. 
B.  Erubin  f.  45  ),  shows  evidently  the  practical  occurrence, 
from  time  to  time,  of  such  hostile  irruptions  during  the 
Roman  rule. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  I7 

And  yet  for  all  the  sympathy  for  the  oppressed  and 
distressed  brethren  that  moved  and  actuated  those  Rab- 
binical legislators,  and  for  all  their  pious  jealousy  for  the 
integrity  of  Jewish  territory  and  its  freedom  from  the 
pollutions  of  godless  heathens,  the  scruple  of  violating  the 
Sabbath  by  exceeding  the  line  o(  lawfulness,  already 
extended  by  way  of  dispensation  for  cases  of  inevitable 
necessity,  would  not  vanish  from  their  minds,  and  we  may 
safely  presume  from  the  minds  of  the  pious  lay  people, 
either. 

Armed  movements  and  acts  on  the  Sabbath  were  held 
unlawful  for  various  reasons,  chief  among  them  seems  to 
have  been,  first,  the  need  of  journeying  beyond  the  Sabbath 
limit  from  one's  habitation  (see  Ant.  xiii.  8,  4),  which  was 
traditionally  set  at  2,000  cubits  (B.  Erubin  f.  51  ;  comp. 
Acts  i.  12  ),  and  secondly,  the  carrying  of  arms  from  private 
precincts  to  public  thoroughfares  and  roads,  and  the 
reverse,  which  was  regarded  as  a  burden,  rangeable  among 
the  principal  kinds  of  common  labor  (  see  Mishnah  Sabb.  f. 
73).  The  former  consideration  is  confirmed  as  historical 
even  by  non-Jewish  testimony  (see  Ant.  1.  c. ),  and  that 
not  later  than  the  first  half  of  the  second  century  B.  C: 

Now,  while  the  Rabbis  of  antiquity  seem  to  have  been 
agreed  that  for  rescuing  brethren  living  in  the  neighbor- 
hood of  a  town,  or  for  defending  a  place  attacked  by 
heathen  enemies,  those  Sabbath  restraints  may  be  set  aside, 
they  would  yet,  in  their  austere  piety,  not  even  leave  such 
allowances  unrestricted,  permitting  to  rescuing  parties, 
after  they  would  have  completed  their  noble  work  of 
relieving  imperiled  brethren,  only  to  return  a  distance  of 
2,000  cubits,  but  not  the  entire  length  of  their  journey  to 
their  homes,  wherefrom  they  had  started  on  the  Sabbath 
(comp.  Mishnah  Rosh  Hash.  1.  c.  yvith  B.  Erubin  f.  45  ). 

The  other  consideration,  the  violatioii  of  the  Sabbath  by 
bearing  one's  armor,  and  consequently  a  burden  on  public 
roads,  weighed  also  so  heavily  with  them  in  questions  of 
defence  and  rescue  that,  although  they  deemed  the  preser- 
vation of  lives  and  country  paramount  to  the  obligation  of 
that  traditional  religious  observance,  they  would  yet  place 


1 8  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

a  restriction  even  on  this  dispensation,  which  was  only 
later  abolished  through  the  sad  experience  of  serious  grief 
entailed  by  such  anxious  application  of  the  Sabbath 
injunction. 

To  such  a  degree,  then,  the  anxiety  and  scrupulosity  as 
to  Sabbath  restraints  were  developed  in  the  Rabbinical  ages 
of  antiquity  !  While  those  pious  teachers  saw  themselves 
induced,  in  ill-fated  times,  to  make  some  concessions  when 
there  was  immediate  or  imminent  danger  of  life,  they 
would  yet  make  them  with  timid  minds  and  the  attachment 
of  cautious  limitations.  The  awe  of  the  Sabbath  had 
permeated  the  Jewish  consciences  so  completely,  that  only 
preservation  of  life  and  country  was  judged  worthy  of 
being  put  in  the  balance  against  the  settled  religious 
restraints.  And  while  the  weight  of  inevitable  necessity 
made  the  opposite  scale  tardily  rise,  it  was  surely  not  a 
sense  oi  levity  or  a  disposition  to  compromise,  that  was 
active  in  making  such  modifications  of  some  parts  of  the 
acknowledged  Sabbath  law.  Dreadful  contingencies  urged 
their  temporary  yielding  to  the  mandate  of  preservation  of 
Jewish  lives  and  habitations. 

The  sacred  earnestness  which  we  have  thus  far  seen  to 
have  prevailed  as  to  the  Sabbath  observance,  inspired  not 
only  the  teachers,  but  unquestionably  also  the  people  at 
large.  The  successive  training  and  usage  of  centuries  had 
established  such  deep  reverence  for  this  weekly  day  of  rest,, 
and  created,  so  to  speak,  such  an  air  of  holiness  in  the 
Jewish  sphere  of  life,  that  equally  the  common  people  and 
the  learned  class  were  possessed  of  an  unbidden  reverent 
devotedness  to  it. 

And  they  would  equally  with  the  doctors  of  the  Law 
imperil  their  lives  for  the  sake  of  the  Sabbath  observance^ 
in  days  of  religious  persecution.  This  they  did,  not  only 
in  the  Maccabean  period,  but  also  again  during  the  cruel 
proscription  visited  on  the  Jews  by  the  emperor  Hadrian,, 
in  the  year  135  or  136  C.  E. 

In  those  bloody  days  of  religious  proscription,  which 
comprised  not  only  the  occupation  of  the  teachers  with 
Scripture  interpretation,  lecturing  on  themes  of  traditional 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  I9 

law,  and  the  ordination  of  scholars  for  the  Rabbinical 
office,  but  also  the  practice  of  any  Jewish  rite  by  the  people 
(see  B.  Baba  Bathra  f  60),  chiefly  the  Abrahamic  rite,  the 
Sabbath,  the  reading  of  Scripture  (Megillath  Taanith  ch 
xii.),  also  the  observances  on  the  festivals  of  Passover  and 
Tabernacles  (Midr.  Rabb.  Lev.  xxxii.  ;  Mechilta  Jethro  vi.), 
the  daily  recitation  of  the  Shema-chapter,  which  was  the 
most  obligatory  portion  of  the  Jewish  ritual  (Tosifta  Berach. 
ii.)  etc.,  the  intrepid  devotion  to  the  ancestral  religion  was 
proved  by  laymen  as  well  as  teachers.  Many  of  them  bore 
a  zealous  and  glorifying  testimony  to  the  unalterable  obli- 
gation of  the  Law  of  God,  by  discharging  their  religious 
duties,  while  they  knew  the  penalty  of  death  impendingon 
them,  if  they  should  be  apprehended  in  the  act.  Not  only 
have  a  number  of  them  endured  tortures  unto  death  for 
disobeying  openly  the  imperial  interdict  by  exercising  the 
Abrahamic  rite  and  refusing  to  serve  idols  (see  B.  Sabbath 
f  130) — the  latter  of  which  we  will  elsewhere  establish  as 
having  also  been  enjoined  by  Hadrian,  only  that  it  was  prob- 
ably not  enforced  so  generally  —  but  some  of  the  stalwart 
religionists  continued  to  put  their  lives  in  jeopardy  by  prac- 
ticing the  various  essential  ceremonies  of  religion  in  defiance 
of  the  prohibitory  edict.  They  were  not  daunted  by  the  risk 
of  being  detected  by  the  imperial  myrmidons  or  informers 
of  their  own  race  —  for  there  were  some  Jewish  renegades 
wicked  enough  to  play  the  vile  part  of  delators  in  those 
fatal  days.  They  would,  it  is  true,  attempt  as  much  as 
possible  to  conceal,  by  different  secret  devices,  their  religious 
observances  from  the  Argus  eyes  of  the  ubiquitous  spies,  as 
they  would  also  relax,  in  some  instances,  certain  minor 
ceremonial  restrictions,  traditionally  observed  in  connection 
with  the  essentials  of  their  religion.  Yet  for  all  their 
measures  of  precaution  they  were  constantly  bearing  their 
lives  in  their  hands,  while  attending  to  ceremonial  functions. 
That  the  threatened  penalty  of  death  did  not  deter  such 
Israelites  from  keeping  the  Sabbath  holy,  is  attested 
by  the  before-quoted  passages  of  Rabb.  Lev.,  and  the 
Mechilta.  They  would,  further,  do  the  Pentateuch  reading 
of  the  Sabbath  on  the  roofs  of  the  houses,  the  attendance 


20  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

at  the  synagogues  or  the  lower  apartments  of  their  houses  ; 

being   too   insecure   (see  Jer.    Erubin    ix.    i),    though    even  \ 
there   they    might    be    discovered    and  seized   to  await  an 

atrocious    visitation     for    offending    against    the    Roman  j 
tyrant's  authority.     With  heroic  steadfastness  they  would 

acknowledge    their    reverence    to    the    Divinely    instituted  i 

Sabbath  in  those  troubled  times,  which  lasted  long  enough,  j 

indeed.       It    was    not    until    some    time    in    the    reign    of  j 

Antoninus    Pius    that,   through   the  intercession    of  Rabbi  j 

Meir's    pupil,    Judah    ben    Shamua — if  we    may   credit  the  j 

testimony  of  a  relative  Rabbinical  tradition  (Megill.  Taan.  j 

1.    c.) — the    cruel    edict    of   the    prohibition    of   the  Jewish  j 
religion  was  revoked. 

The  Sabbath  was  then  re-instated  in  its  pristine  freedom,  j 

The    pious    fervor    with    which    it    had    been    customarily  | 

observed,  was  yet  increased,  now  the  oppressive  ban  was  [ 

removed,  and  intensified  by  a   deep  sense   of  gratitude  to  1 

the  Divine  Ruler  who  had  in  his  mercy  disposed,  that  his  j 

servants  should    again   be  able  to  bear   the   "yoke   of  the  I 

sacred  commands,"  without  fear  of  human  punishment.  j 

Hadrian's  war  of  extermination   (Shemad)    was  another  J 

"iron  furnace,"  in  which  Israel's  indomitable,  iron  tenacity  1 

to  their  religion  was  severely  tested  and  found  proof.     He  '. 
had   indeed  struck  a  grievous  blow  at  the  root  of  Israel's 

proud  existence,  their  religion,  aiming  by  such   barbarous  ' 

deeds  at  the  total  overthrow  of  the  trunk  that  had  breasted  ! 

so  successfully  the  raging  storms  of  the    past.      But  that  | 
"  ridiculous    sophist    and    jealous    tyrant "    erred    in     his 
calculation.     Israel's  vitality  was  too  vigorous  to  succumb 
to  his  unrelenting  furor.     They  again  came  forth  victoriously 

as  to  the   preservation  of   their   religion,  holding   aloft  its  I 

banner  with  the  inscription    of   "Jehovah  is  One,"  ensan-  j 

guined   though    it    was   through    the   martyrdom  of  those  ! 

upholding   the   authority  of    the  law   of  God,   in    open   or  ! 

secret  defiance  of  that  of  a  human  tyrant.  ] 

Alas  !  once  more  should  the   freedom  of  the  Sabbath  be  | 

disturbed  by  Roman  interference.     It  was  in  the  reign  of  j 

Marcus    Aurelius    and     Aelius    Verus,    the    successors    of  j 

Antoninus    Pius,    that    the  Hadrianic  proscription  of  the  ! 


J 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  21 

fundamental  and  essential  rites  of  the  Jewish  religion  was 
renewed,  about  165-69  C.  E.  (B.  Meilah  f.  17,  and  see 
Muenter,  The  Jewish  War,  etc.;  also  Graetz,  History). 
Again  it  was,  so  the  Talmud  relates,  a  Rabbinical  doctor, 
Rabbi  Simeon  ben  Jochai,  who  accomplished  the  repeal  of 
the  interdict.  It  seems,  however,  in  view  of  the  fact  that 
Marcus  Aurelius  was  not  at  heart  an  enemy  of  the  Jews 
(see  Muenter  1.  c.  p.  lOO),  having  also,  as  we  prefer  to  assume 
with  Rappaport,  befriended  the  eminent  Jewish  patriarch, 
Judah  I.,  to  have  lasted  only  a  short  time.  From  the  day 
of  its  revocation  we  meet  with  no  more  imperial  prohibitions 
of  the  Sabbath.  The  civil  condition  of  the  Jews  improved 
henceforth  more  and  more  with  the  accession  of  rulers  of 
the  Roman  world,  who  had  sufficient  respect  and  toleration 
for  their  religious  institutions,  not  to  vex  them  in  their 
earnest  efforts  to  maintain  them  intact.  And  thus  could 
also  the  Sabbath  obtain  back  its  royal  glory  and  solemn 
grandeur,  so  much  dimmed  during  the  past  ages  of  perse- 
cution. The  sceptre  the  Sabbath  had  since  centuries 
borne  and  swayed  so  freely  and  so  blissfully  for  those 
yielding  implicit  obedience  to  it,  was  from  that  time  on 
no  more  wrested  from  it  by  unholy  attempts  of  cruel  rulers. 
They  had,  however,  to  contend  yet  with  other  adversaries^ 
not  materially  aggressive,  but  none  the  less  aiming  with 
set  purpose  at  the  honor  and  validity  of  the  Jewish  Sabbath 
—  I  mean  the  pagan  writers  who  treated  the  Jewish 
religious  rites,  among  them  the  Sabbath,  with  haughty 
scorn  and  heartless  derision  ;  the  Jewish  Christians,  making 
light  of  some  traditional  Sabbath  injunctions  ;  and  further, 
the  Gentile  Christians,  who  attempted  to  detract  more  and 
more  from  the  obligation  of  the  Sabbath  of  the  Decalogue, 
and  enthrone  in  its  stead  another  d&y,  the  first  of  the  week, 
These  points  we  will  now  discuss  severally. 


CHAPTER   II. 


PACxAN   WRITERS   ON   THE  JEWISH    RELIGION   AND   THE 
SABBATH. 

We  have  already  before  cited  the  utterances  of  Agathar- 
chides  and  Plutarch  on  the  Jewish  Sabbath  rest.     We  will 
now  deal  with  the  fabulous  allegations  and  odious  allusions 
which   the  bitterest  libeler  of  the   nationality  and   religion 
of  the  Jews   ever  produced    in    a  Greek-speaking   country, 
Apion,  a  grammarian  and    rhetor  of  Alexandria,  attempted 
concerning  it.     He  flourished  at  a  period  most  unfortunate 
to  the  Jews  of  that  city,  the  first  half  of  the  first  century  C. 
E.     He  was  a   native  of  the  rural  part  of  Egypt,  yet   pre- 
tended  to   Alexandrian-Greek   birth   and    citizenship,   and 
made  it  his  prime  object  to  work  upon  the  "  ancient  and  as 
it  were  innate  enmity  "  of  the  Grecian  inhabitants  to  their 
Jewish    fellow-citizens     (see    Philo,  Against   Flaccus  §   5), 
which  was  particularly  aroused  to  a  fierce  degree  about  that 
period,  and  to  scatter,  with  flattering  prospect  of  universal 
credence,  in   his  several   writings  the  most  scurrilous   and 
fabulous  invectives  against  them  as  to  their  national  origin, 
their  ancestors'   departure  from  Egypt,  and   their  various 
religious  rites  and  customs.     Following   in  the   main  those 
hostile  authors  who  had  before  written  with  the  same  object 
and  in  the  same  strain,  as  Manetho  (about  B.  C.  250),  Molo 
(B,  C.   90),   Posidonius   (B.    C.   70),   Cheremon    (B.    C.    50), 
Lysimachus   (B.  C.  30)   and  others,   he  yet   added   from  his 
own    mind   some    "very   frigid   and    contemptible   things" 
( Josephus,  Against  Apion,  ii.   i).     He  made  of   the    Jc-.ws 
original  Egyptians,  in  order  to  dispute  their  claim  to  Greek 
citizenship,    and   to   represent   them   before  the    vulgar    as 
aliens  in    the  city   of  Alexandria.     Transcribing   the   older 
Jew-hating  writers  as  to   Israel's  expulsion  from    Egypt,  he 
put  forth,  on  his  own  account,  a  most  fictitious    representa- 
tion of  their  journey  from   there  to  Judea,  with   which    he 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  23 

connects  the  malignantly  absurd  story  of  the  origin  of  the 
name  Sabbath.  "  When  the  Jews  had  traveled  a  six  days' 
journey,"  he  declares,  "  they  had  buboes  in  their  groins." 
It  was  "  on  this  account  that  they  rested  on  the  seventh 
day,  as  having  got  safely  to  that  country  which  is  now 
called  Judea  ;  they  preserved  the  language  of  the  Egyptians, 
and  called  that  day  the  Sabbath,  for  that  malady  of  buboes 
in  their  groin  was  named  Sabbatosis  by  the  Egyptians." 
Josephus  undertook  to  write  an  apology  of  his  co-religionists 
to  controvert  some  of  the  most  preposterous  and  at  the 
same  time  grievous  misrepresentations  of  Jews  and  Judaism 
made  in  previous  works  of  Grecian  writers,  and  particularly 
to  confute  a  number  of  contemptuous  slanders  hurled 
against  the  Jews  in  his  time  by  that  literary  mountebank, 
Apion.  Josephus  had  no  difficulty  in  dispellinghis  senseless 
insinuation  regarding  the  Sabbath.  "  If  Sabbo,"  he  rejoins, 
"  really  meant  that  malady  in  the  Egyptian  language,  it 
was  yet  so  widely  different  from  Sabbath,  which  is  Hebrew 
and  denotes  "  rest "  (ib.  ii.  2).  But  how  many  of  the 
Asiatic  and  African  Greeks  or  Romans  of  that  century 
were  inclined  to  hear  and  read  a  vindication  of  anything 
Jewish,  and  be  disabused  of  erroneous  notions  on  Judaism 
formed  and  fostered  in  their  minds  with  obdurate  partiality  .'' 
Few,  indeed,  would  be  influenced  by  Jewish  apologetical 
writings  to  give  up  their  prejudices  and  ill-will  nurtured 
against  the  Jews  in  those  days.  In  Alexandria,  where 
Jews  had  resided  since  centuries,  enjoying  guaranteed 
rights  and  privileges  with  the  rest  of  the  Greek  citizens 
(ib.  ii.  4),  and  occupying,  in  Philo's  time,  two,  out  of  the 
five  districts  into  which  the  city  was  divided  (Against 
Flaccus,  §  8),  the  heathen  populace  cherished  a  profound 
chagrin  at  that  equality  which  entitled  them  to.  every 
public  distinction  and  social  prominence.  Under  Caesar, 
whose  fair  treatment  of  the  Jews  of  Alexandria  stood 
embodied  in  a  documentary  grant  publicly  exhibited  on  a 
certain  pillar  of  that  city  (Ag.  Ap.  1.  c),  as  also  in  the 
reigns  of  Augustus  and  Tiberius,  who  were  firmly  protecting 
its  Jewish  inhabitants  against  any  injury,  as  well  as  strongly 
guarding   the   religious   liberty    of  the   Jews   in   the   whole 


24  THE  SABIJATH  IN   HISTORY. 

empire  (Philo,  Ag.  Flacc.  §  7,  lO  ;  Legatio  §  8, 40  ;  Josephus, 
Ant.  xix.  5,  3),  the  Alexandrian  populace  could  not  vent 
their  ill-will  to  the  Jews  by  any  palpable  acts  of  violence. 
They  could  harbor  d^ep  prejudice  against  them,  scorn 
and  envy  them  at  heart,  but  further  they  might  not 
dare  to  go,  knowing  that  a  willing  Csesar  was  always 
prepared  to  chastise  mutinous  mobs.  Things  took  a  differ- 
ent turn,  however,  with  the  accession  of  that  frantic 
monster,  Caligula.  Under  this  Herod-like  emperor 
unspeakable  mischief  and  indignities  were  visited  on  the 
Jews  of  Alexandria. 

The  governor,  Flaccus,  who  had  for  five  years,  as  long  as 
Tiberius  was  on  the  throne,  behaved  himself  tolerantly  to 
the  Jews,  suddenly  changed  his  policy  when  the  empire 
came  into  the  hands  of  that  furious  tyrant,  Caligula. 
Riotous  attacks  upon  the  Jews  were  schemed  by  the  Alex- 
andrian mob —  and  they  were  not  an  inconsiderable  portion 
of  the  population — and  Flaccus  conspired  with  them. 
They  knew  that  the  Jews  could  be  provoked  by  no  insult 
to  a  higher  pitch  than  by  idolatrous  intrusions.  So  they 
concluded  to  erect  images  and  statues,  representing  the 
reigning  emperor,  in  the  synagogues,  "  putting  forth  the 
name  of  the  emperor  as  a  screen  "  (  Ag.  Flacc.  §  6  ). 

This  was  surely  a  false  pretense,  for  Caligula  had  then 
given  no  such  orders.  His  deification  and  orders  of  erec- 
tion of  statues  of  himself  in  places  of  worship,  were  of  a 
later  date.  But  the  Grecian  m.ob  knew  well,  that  the  Jewish 
heart  was  implacable  against  interference  with  their  mono- 
theistic belief,  and  that  their  abhorrence  of  image-worship 
was  too  intense  to  allow  any  trifling  with  it.  To  make 
sure  that  the  peaceful  Jews  would  be  violently  roused  and 
thus  get  involved  in  a  riotous  disturbance,  as  well  as  to 
wound  them  most  severely  at  the  vital  nerve  of  their 
spiritual  existence,  nothing  could  be  designed  as  having  so 
prompt  an  effect  as  an  attempt  at  profaning  their  houses  of 
worship  with  idols. "^  A  synagogue  in  which  idols  were 
forced,  was  indeed  held  by  the  Jews  equal  to  being 
destroyed.  This  is  evident  from  various  passages  in 
Philo's  "  Flaccus  "  and  "  Legatio." 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  25 

Flaccus  was  not  satisfied  with  the  defilement  of  the  syna- 
gogues alone.  He  further  issued  an  ordinance  declaring 
the  Jews  as  "foreigners  and  aliens,"  and  gave  also  license 
to  the  heathens  to  exterminate  them  (  Flacc.  §  8  ).  A 
furious  onset  by  the  mob  ensued.  Plunder,  destruction  of 
life  and  property,  unnameable  cruelties  were  perpetrated 
upon  the  helpless  Jews  of  Alexandria.  Fortunately  for 
them,  Agrippa  I.,  the  Jewish  tetrarch  bearing  the  title  of 
King,  had  come  there  a  second  time  during  this  year  of 
persecution,  and  succeeded  to  bring  about  a  cessation  of 
the  hostilities  and  to  "  rectify  things."  This,  however,  meant 
only  a  truce  for  awhile.  For  a  new  governor  was  sent  there 
after  the  removal  of  Flaccus,  in  38  C.  E.,  whose  fierce 
antagonism  to  the  Jews  did  not  much  fall  short  of  that  of 
his  predecessor.  Moreover,  his  administration  fell  in  with 
his  master's  order  of  deification  of  himself,  in  which  the 
Jews  could  never  acquiesce,  so  that  they  could  not  have 
expected  a  more  lenient  treatment  from  him,  had  he  even 
individually  been  favorably  disposed  towards  them.  Caius 
Caligula,  after  dispensing  cruel  death  to  a  friendly  adviser, 
to  his  father-in-law,  also  to  his  cousin,  and  banishment  to 
his  sisters  after  blasting  their  honor  (  Suetonius,  Caligula,  § 
24),  aspired  to  be  adored  as  a  god.  He  commenced  with 
presenting  himself  in  the  garb  of  demi-gods,  such  as  Her- 
cules, Castor  and  Pollux,  Bacchus  ;  then  pretended  to  the 
dignity  of  such  divinities  as  Mercur}-,  Apollo,  Mars  (Philo, 
Leg.  §§  II,  13),  till  lastly  he  claimed  to  be  Jupiter  incarnate 
( ib.  §  29),  and  had  a  temple  erected  to  his  own  deity,  in 
which  he  placed  a  golden  statue  of  himself,  dressed  in  the 
same  vestments  he  would  wear  in  person  every  day  (  Sue- 
tonius 1.  c.  §  22  ). 

What  the  Jews  could  expect  under  the  rule  of  such  a 
frenzied  autocrat,  was  easy  to  predict.  The  mania  of  his 
godship  possessed  him  so  thoroughly,  that  no  other  con- 
sideration of  policy  or  humanity  could  prevail  against  it. 
Suspecting  the  Jews,  at  the  outset  of  his  claim  of  divinity, 
as  opposing  it  obstinately  (Leg.  §§  16,  30),'  he  conceived  a 
bitter  hatred  to  them  which,  becoming  soon  known  to  the 
pagan  Alexandrians  (ib.  §§  18,  20),  was  improved   by  them 


26  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

to  commit  the  most  barbarous  hostilities  against  their 
Jewish  fellow-citizens,  Alas  !  they  were  to  be  citizens  no 
more,  but  held  as  "  the  very  lowest  of  slaves  "  (ib.  §  i6). 
The  infamous  populace  could  now,  without  fear  of  punish- 
ment, turn  their  fury  against  them.  And  they  did  so. 
Philo  has  described  their  fearful  suffering,  the  most 
grievous  part  of  it,  in  his  own  eyes  as  well  as  in  those  of 
his  co-religionists,  was  the  dedication  of  the  synagogues  to 
the  worship  of  Caius  !  To  curry  the  favor  of  the  emperor, 
they  ostentatiously  published,  in  their  "journals"  which  he 
delighted  so  much  to  read,  that  they  had  transformed  the 
synagogues  to  his  temples  (ib.  §  25),  whereby  they  had 
crushed  the  Jews  to  the  dust,  whom  they  knew  to  prefer 
death  to  such  profanation  of  their  synagogues. 

The  governor,  whose  name  is  not  given,  looked  inactively 
on  wh-ile  the  many  atrocities  were  perpetrated  upon  the 
Jews,  "allowing  the  mob  to  carry  on  the  war  against  them 
without  any  restraint"  (ib.  §  20).  It  seems  even  that, 
inspired  by  the  central  authority  of  Rome,  he  was  himself 
very  active  in  oppressing  the  Jews  with  religious  prohibi- 
tions. We  learn  from  Philo  ("On  Dreams"  §  18),  that  a 
certain  governor  had  endeavored  to  change  and  abolish  the 
Jewish  laws  and  customs,  and  to  this  end  began  with 
forcing  them  to  violate  the  Sabbath,  "thinking  that  this 
measure  would  be  the  beginning  of  the  departure  from  the 
whole  ancestral  Judaism."  There  is  indeed  no  historical 
evidence  that  this  governor  was  identical  with  the  one 
under  notice.  But  the  language  he  used  in  his  cruel 
mockery  of  the  Jews,  when  he  found  them  determined  not 
to  transgress  the  pivotal  law  of  the  Sabbath,  savors  much 
of  the  spirit  then  predominating  at  the  imperial  court. 
The  governor,  in  his  harangue  to  the  Jews,  gave  himself  out 
as  a  combination  and  concentration  of  all  thinkable  evils 
and  dangers  to  life,  before  which  the  Sabbath  should  give 
way  even  to  the  pious  Jews,  as  he  thought  it  otherwise 
customarily  yielded  in  such  cases  of  extremity.  Are  we 
by  it  not  reminded  of  Caligula's  pretension  to  be  himself 
the  embodiment  of  law,  against  which  no  other  human  will 
or  time-honored  statute  counted  for  anything  ?     It  was  but 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  2/ 

natural,  from  the  truism  of  '  like  master,  like  servant,'  that 
his  subordinates  should  be  congenial  to  him,  and  act  with 
the  same  arrogance  of  power  and  a  claim  of  irresponsibility, 
lesser  in  degree  than  the  master's,  only  inasmuch  as  the 
governors  had  also,  on  their  part,  to  conform  to  the 
emperor's  one-man  will. 

The  Alexandrian  Jews  sought  again  relief  through  the 
medium  of  Agrippa,  who  was  a  most  intimate  friend  and 
favorite  of  Caligula.  They  addressed  a  petition  to  him,  in 
which  they  extensively  set  forth  their  profound  loyalty,  as 
well  as  the  violent  treatment  they  had  received  from  the 
governors  and  the  populace.  Soon  after  they  determined 
to  send  an  embassy  of  representative  men  to  Rome  to  plead 
their  cause  before  the  emperor,  or  rather,  as  it  would  appear 
from  the  passage  in  Leg.  §  29,  that  the  delegates  themselves 
could  not  forbear  to  be  "involved  in  the  lawlessness 
of  which  all  the  rest  made  themselves  guilty"  (  b}^  having, 
namely,  in  their  midst  synagogues  profaned  by  images  of  a 
deified  man),  these  offered  their  services  of  their  own 
accord  and  voluntary  resolution.  One  of  them  was  the 
philosopher  of  world-wide  fame,  Philo,  a  brother  to  the 
alabarch  or  imperially  authorized  president  of  the  Alexan- 
drian Jewish  community,  Alexander,  who  had,  without 
doubt  for  his  stanch  fidelity  to  God  and  refusing  to  own 
the  Roman  monster  as  deity,  incurred  his  displeasure  and 
was  put  in  prison,  from  which  he  was  not  released  till  the 
accession  of  Claudius  (Ant.  xix.  5,  i).  The  ambassadors, 
five  in  number  according  to  Philo — who  certainly  knew 
better  than  Josephus  how  many  they  were,  the  latter  having 
perhaps  drawn  his  relative  information  from  a  more  distant 
pagan  source,  in  which  the  delegation  was  stated  as  con- 
sisting of  three  men — set  sail  in  midwinter  of  38  39  C.  E., 
embarking  on  their  awful  mission  with  resolute  hearts,  and 
doubly  staking  their  lives,  as  they  really  did,  in  committing 
themselves  to  the  doubtful  mercy  of  the  waves  and  the 
undoubted  frenzy  of  an  all-powerful  ruler,  for  the  vindica- 
tion of  their  ancestral  religion"  and  their  cruelly  insulted 
brethren. 

(3; 


2S  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

The  Alexandrian  populace,  too,  had  dispatched  represen- 
tatives to  plead  before  the  emperor  in  defence  of  their 
actions,  and  at  the  same  time  to  denounce,  with  every 
possible  calumniation,  their  Jewish  fellow-residents.  Jose- 
phus  (ib.  xviii.  8,  i)  states  their  number  also  to  have  been 
three,  and  lets,  moreover,  the  two  delegations  be  chosen  by 
agreement  of  the  two  parties  at  feud.  This  sounds,  however, 
utterly  incredible,  when  we  consider  the  many  violent  acts 
and  enormous  indignities  inflicted  on  the  Jewish  community 
by  the  hateful  populace  for  at  least  two  years,  and  conse- 
quently the  implacable  resentment  the  former  must  have 
felt  towards  their  persecutors.  Can  it  then,  in  view  of  the 
deepest  animosity  existing  between  the  two  parties,  be 
imagined  that  they  arranged  a  peaceable  meeting,  in 
which  either  of  them  should  have  proposed  and  agreed 
upon  a  submission  of  their  quarrel  to  the  imperial  tribunal  ? 
And  what  point  of  dissension  could  it  have  been  that  was 
to  be  submitted?  The  civil  rights  of  the  Jews,  disannulled 
by  Caius'  governors,  and  disputed  by  the  envious  and  hateful 
populace.''  Surely  the  gravely  insulted  Jews  would  not  have 
condescended  and  given  them  the  satisfaction  of  being  a 
party  in  a  suit,  in  which  they  had  not  in  the  least  any 
legitimate  voice,  and  of  co-operating  towards  settling  a 
question  and  resolving  a  douOt  that  practically  existed  not, 
•  the  Jewish  rights  being  matter  of  governmental  record,  to 
interpret  which  not  the  pagan  Alexandrians,  but  the 
imperial  tribunal  was  the  proper  authority.  Or  should  the 
Jews  have  suggested  to  their  enemies  a  joint  deputation, 
and  acted  so  much  against  their  own  best  interests,  by 
giving  the  fanatical,  rapacious  and  murderous  populace  yet 
a  chance  of  extenuating,  in  the  course  of  a  controversial 
suit,  their  enormous  crimes  committed  against  them  .''  No, 
indeed.  We  therefore  presume  as  much  more  likely  under 
the  then  circumstances,  that  no  understanding  at  all  was 
had  between  the  Jews  and  pagans  of  Alexandria,  but 
that  the  Jewish  delegation  was  resolved  on  without  the 
knowledge  of  the  latter,  for  fear  of  forcible  interference 
from  them  and,  perhaps,  the  governor,  whose  power  of 
forbidding   their   departure    was    unquestioned.       By    some 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  29 

prudent  arrangements,  we  suppose,  they  escaped  discovery, 
and  succeeded  to  set  out  on  their  voyage  unhindered. 
Their  departure  must  however,  we  further  suggest,  soon 
have  become  known.  This  made  the  Alexandrian  populace 
hastily  move  to  send  on  also  a  delegation  of  their  own',  in 
order  not  to  be  overreached  by  the  Jews. 

Josephus  states  that  the  above-named  libeler,  Apion,  was 
one  of  the  heathen  delegation,  presenting  him  as  a  sort  of 
spokesman  of  the  opposition.  Having  no  evidence  to  the 
contrary,  we  must  not  dispute  the  accuracy  of  this  state- 
ment. We  can,  however,  not  help  wondering,  why,  if 
Apion  had  really  been  such  a  prominent  member  of  the 
heathen  delegation,  Philo  has  not  once  mentioned  him  as 
such.  From  Philo's  report  it  would,  further,  appear  as 
rather  more  likely  that  not  Apion,  but  Isidorus,  a  most 
dangerous  demagogue  of  Alexandria,  was  the  main  speaker 
of  the  opposition  at  the  ambassadors'  meeting  with  the 
emperor  (see  Leg.  §  45).  But  what  matter,  who  of  the 
heathen  Alexandrians  present  was  the  loudest  and  most 
forward  in  the  denunciation  of  the  Jews  ?  It  is  sufficient  to 
know  that  all  of  them  were  united  as  to  the  charge  of 
disloyalty  and  disobedience  to  the  emperor.  This  accusa- 
tion had,  under  the  circumstances,  no  need  of  even  being 
formulated  in  speeches.  Caligula's  mind  was  already  filled 
completely  with  this  most  aggravating  supposition,  before 
the  embassy  arrived  at  Rome.  The  information  of  Capito, 
a  collector  of  imperial  revenues  in  Judea,  against  the  Jews, 
that  they  had  torn  down  an  altar  erected  at  Jamnia  to  the 
worship  of  the  god  Caius  (ib.  §  30),  and  the  hostile 
insinuations  of  such  courtiers  as  Helicon  and  Apelles  (see 
ib.),  had  sufficiently  confirmed  him  in  it.  What  this  fresh 
set  of  maligners  could  accomplish,  was  merely  adding  some 
fuel  .to  the  already  burning  rage  of  the  emperor  at  the 
refusal  of  the  Jews  to  acquiesce  in  his  pretension  to  be  God. 

His  mind  was  withal,  as  we  suppose,  already  at  a  previ- 
ous and  early  period  irritated  against  the  Jews  through  the 
insidious  work  of  that  Alexandrian  sycophant  Helicon, 
who  was  "chamberlain  and  chief  body-guard"  to  him,  and 
who,  as  Philo  further  observes,  "discharged  all  his  Egyptian 


30  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

venom  against  the  Jews,"  (ib.),  "exciting  and  exasperating 
his  master  against  them"  (ib.  §  28).  Having  risen  from  a 
slave  to  the  dignity  of  influential  courtier  under  Caligula, 
he  used  his  influence  extensively  to  instil  his,  in  a  manner, 
native  ill-feeling  and  antagonism  to  the  Jews  into  his 
susceptible  spirit.  His  "satirical  and  quizzing  observations 
mingled  with  his  more  formal  and  serious  accusations"  (ib. 
§  27),  formed  no  doubt  a  most  frequent  subject  of  his 
conversation  with  the  emperor,  to  whom  he  was  a  constant 
companion.  He  could,  too,  talk  so  largely  to  him  about 
Jewish  customs,  from  his  early  notice  of  them  in  his  native 
city,  Alexandria,  where  he  had  as  instructors  the  "  chatter- 
ing part  of  the  population"  (ib.  §  26) — those  rhetorical  and 
literary  mountebanks  of  the  type  of  Apion — that  the  master 
would  easily  look  to  him  as  an  authority  upon  everything 
pertaining  to  Jews  and  their  religion.  We  think  not  to 
judge  amiss  in  attributing  the  failure  of  the  Alexandrian 
Jewish  delegation  to  vindicate  their  nation  and  national 
religion  before  the  emperor,  for  the  most  part  to  this 
perfidious  sycophant,  who  would  systematically  and  assidu- 
ously undermine  the  ground  of  defence  and  apology,  on 
which  those  earnest  Jewish  men  could  place  themselves  to 
support  their  cause. 


CHAPTER  III. 


PAGAN     WRITERS     ON     THE    JEWISH     RELIGION     AND     THE 
SABBATH. — CONTINUED. 

That  the  Alexandrian  and    other  Greek   works  in   which 
notices    of  Jewish   history   and    religious    rites    occur,    had 
some  influence   on  the    Roman  writers   who  also   presented 
Jewish  accounts  in   their  various   compositions,   we   are  far 
from    disputing,    although    it    is    demonstrable    in    Tacitus 
only.     This    "  grave   personage "   had    evidently    read    and 
made   use  of  a   number  of  those    Grecian    works.     Instead, 
however,   of  consulting   for  a    true   historical   purpose    the 
universally  accessible  Greek  version  of  the   Bible,  and  also 
the  works  of  Philo  and   Josephus  that    had  long  before    his 
time    of   writing    been    published,    he    preferred,  from    his 
haughty    contempt    for    the    Jewish    people,    to    draw    his 
information  from    those    heathen  sources,  however  turbid' 
and  incongruent   with  one  another  they  were  in  regard   to 
the    description    of   the    ancient    historical    events    of    the 
nation  of  Israel.     He   particularly  copied,   as   we  will  later 
see,   Lysimachus   and    Apion,   Alexandrian   authors   whose 
names  appeared  already  in  our  previous  discussion. 

But  that  the  hatred  to  the  Jews  which  was  found  among 
the  generality  of  the  pagans,  and  is  also  encountered  in 
Roman  literature,  should  originally  have  emanated  from 
Egypt,  that  is,  from  the  Alexandrian  writings  of  Manetho, 
Cheremon,  Lysimachus,  Apion,  and  others,  as  Dr.  Joel, 
''Blicke  in  die  Religionsgeschichie"  ii.  p.  io6 ;  116-19, 
suggests,  we  cannot  accept  as  resting  on  any  plausible 
grounds.  Nor  can  we  agree  with  him  as  to  his  conjoined 
proposition,  that  Greek  authors,  such  as  Posidonius  and 
ApoUonius  Molo  who  also  wrote  on  Jewish  matters,  had 
already  "long  (  before  Apion )  thrown  the  Alexandrian 
fables,  passed  as  Jewish    history,  on   the  Roman  market,  so 


32  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

that  it  need  not  be  wondered  at  that,  as  once  Cicero  who, 
as  an  adherent  of  Pompey,  had  the  Jews  against  himself, 
was  edified  by  them,  so  later  Tacitus  propounded,  on  the 
strength  of  such  authorities,  his  opinions  on  Jews  and 
Judaism,  opinions  that  are  surely  all  but  creditable  to  him." 

As  to  the  delight  which  Joel  lets  Cicero  have  felt  over 
the  reproductions,  by  Posidonius,  Molo  and  others,  of  the 
Alexandrian  stories  about  the  Jews,  we  have  to  object,  first, 
that  there  is  to  our  knowledge  no  evidence  at  all  adducible 
that  either  one  of  those  writers  had  spread  them  in  Rome. 
That  Cicero  had  Molo,^  the  rhetorician,  for  his  teacher, 
whose  school  at  Rhodes,  Greece,  he  attended  even  twice, 
is  true.  Yet  it  proves  nothing  as  to  the  question  of  his 
acceptance  of  Jew-hating  sentiments  from  him,  a  theory 
also  advanced  by  Graetz  (History  of  the  Jews,  iii.  p.  171), 
who  attributes  Cicero's  antagonism  to  Jews  to  the  influence 
excited  by  that  Greek  mentor  on  this,  his  Roman  pupil. 
Such  conjecture  is,  however,  too  far-fetched.  Hatred  to 
Jews  was  a  sentiment  which  required  no  cultivation  at  the 
hands  of  a  teacher.  Nor  can  it  be  supposed  that  it  consti- 
tuted a  subject  in  the  course  of  study  at  that  particular 
school.  Had  we  to  assume  that  such  was  the  case,  we 
would  consistently  have  to  expect  to  meet  with  the  same 
aversion  to  Jews  in  Caesar's  documents  and  acts  recorded 
in  historical  works,  for  he,  too,  studied  under  that  Greek 
master.  But  we  know  to  the  contrary,  that  he  had  shown 
a  constant  favorable  disposition  to  the  Jews.  Secondly 
and  mainly  we  object,  that  it  is  altogether  insupportable  to 
account  for  Cicero's  position  towards  the  Jews  by  Grecian 
influence.  Let  us  now  inquire  whether  such  influence  is 
discernible  anywhere  in  his  extant  writings. 

The  frothy  pun  which  he  flung  out  in  his  Oration  as 
prosecutor  of  Verres, — a  man  who,  as  senatorial  governor 
of  Sicily,  was  to  its  inhabitants  what  Florus,  in  the  subse- 
quent century,  proved  himself  as  imperial  procurator  of 
Judea,  namely,  a  villainous  grinder  of  the  people  and 
defrauder  of  their  substance  and  privileges, — "  What  has  a 
Jew  to  do  with  pork  .''"  will  surely  not  be  held  out  as  a 
reasonable  indication  of  his  settled  antagonism  to  the  Jews. 


THE  SABBATli  IN  HISTORY.  33 

Nor  can  we  discern  in  his  Oration  for  Flaccus  who  had 
been  charged  with  various  acts  of  official  malpractice  while 
he  was  governor  of  Asia  Minor,  one  of  the  charges  having 
been  the  confiscation  of  the  annual  contributions  of  the 
Jews  of  that  province  to  the  temple  of  Jerusalem,  any 
acquaintance  with  Alexandrian  or  other  Grecian  Jew-hating 
literature  at  all. 

In  the  defence  of  his  client  before  the  court  at  Rome, 
Cicero  had  to  deal  with  three  sets  of  charges  brought 
against  Flaccus  by  Laelius  who,  having  contracted  a  deep 
grudge  against  him  and  being  besides,  as  it  is  intimated  in 
the  oration  itself,  probably  abetted  by  Pompey,  had  at  great 
expense  procured  Asiatic  witnesses  to  testify  against  the 
accused,  acting  at  the  same  time  as  his  prosecutor.  The 
charges  were,  first,  those  of  Greek  witnesses  from  Phrygia 
and  Mysia  ;  secondly,  those  of  Jewish  witnesses,  probably 
from  those  cities  in  which  Flaccus  had  seized  the  Jewish 
sacred  money,  as  Apamea,  Laodicea,  Adramyttium  and 
Pergamus,  or,  if  none  such  had  come  to  Rome  from  their 
native  places  (Cicero  does  indeed  not  mention  any  Asiatic 
Jews  as  present  at  the  court),  of  Roman  Jewish  representa- 
tives who  voluntarily  and  out  of  sympathy  undertook  to 
plead  the  cause  of  their  Asiatic  brethren,  or,  possibly,  of 
Laelius  himself,  who  may  have  individually  assumed  to  act 
as  champion  of  the  grievance  of  those  Jews  and  to  prefer 
theif  charges  as  their  witness  ;  and  lastly,  of  Roman  citi- 
zens who  had  brought  complaints  against  him. 

At  the  outset  we  may  state,  that  the  assault  which  Cicero 
made  upon  the  Jews  in  his  oration,  does  by  far  not  equal  in 
vehemence  and  acrimony  his  contemptuous  arraignment  of 
pagan  Greeks  in  the  same  address.  This  point  is  too 
important  to  be  left  out  of  consideration  in  the  question 
before  us.  We  will  refer  to  it  again  later,  in  treating  of 
Juvenal's  remarks  on  Jewish  customs.  Compared  with  the 
striking  reproaches  which  Cicero  in  his  oration  threw  on 
the  Greeks  of  Asia  in  general,  the  contumelious  sallies 
against  the  Jews  must  be  pronounced  mild,  indeed.  The 
butt  of  his  attack  on   the  Jews  was  their  religion,  and  in 


34  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

particular  that  religious  custom  on  which  the  charged  dere- 
liction of  his  client  turned  —  the  contribution  of  sacred 
money  to  the  Temple  treasury — rather  than  they  them- 
selves as  a  nation,  whom  he  would  accuse  of  nothing  else 
than  of  enmity  to  his  country,^  and  this,  on  account  of 
their  armed  resistance  to  Pompey's  forces,  and  by  it  to  the 
Roman  supremacy,  and  of  lack  of  patriotism  towards 
Rome,  because  they  were  "  at  times  unruly  in  the  assem- 
blies in  defence  of  the  interests  of  the  republic."  Not  a 
word  of  disparagement  of  their  general  or  individual 
character  did  he  put  forth,  however,  unless  we  account  his 
charge  of  their  want  of  patriotic  attachment  for  Rome,  for 
which  he  indeed  proposes  that  "  it  would  be  wisdom  to 
despise  them,"  as  such.  But  we  would  venture  the  asser- 
tion, that  not  even  in  the  innermost  mind  of  Cicero  the  case 
of  the  Jews  in  conquered  provinces  and  anywhere  in  the 
Roman  empire,  where  they  were  not  treated  as  equal 
citizens,  could  fall  under  the  category  of  a  real  moral  delin- 
quency. An  unpatriotic  position  could  be  reprehensible 
only  in  those  cases  where  people  had  been  granted  the 
complete  benefits  of  Roman  citizenship. 

How  different,  however,  was  his  language  regarding  the 
Greeks  !  He  not  only  denounced  their  witnesses  present 
at  the  trial,  but  their  entire  race  in  Asia,  as  worthless, 
because  faithless,  creatures.  Not  only  did  he  declare  them 
enemies  of  Rome  in  much  stronger  terms  than  the  Jews, 
saying  about  them,  that  they  "  abominate  the  sight  of  our 
faces  and  detest  our  name,"  and  that  "  it  was  their  power 
and  not  their  inclination  that  was  unequal  to  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  republic."  He  even  branded  them  unreservedly, 
in  equivalent  words,  as  a  nation  of  liars  and  perjurers  (  see 
Oration  §§4,  S,  iS)- 

Again,  while  he  has  no  hesitancy  in  loudly  stigmatizing 
the  whole  class  of  the  Asiatic  Greeks  to  which  the  witnesses 
belonged,  as  faithless  and  having  no  regard  to  truth,  he 
finds  himself,  by  the  "  great  unanimity  "  of  the  Jews  as  a 
body,  and  the  "  weight  they  carry  in  the  popular  assem- 
blies," constrained  to  utter  his  opprobrious  invective  against 
them  "  in  a  low  voice,  just  so  as  to  let  the  judges  hear  him,'^ 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  35 

afraid  of  their  becoming  "  excited  against  himself  and 
against  every  eminent  man,"  if  those  of  their  race  who 
attended  at  the  trial  should  hear  his  reproachful  declama- 
tions about  them. 

This  is  assuredly  a  tacit  admission,  on  the  part  of  Cicero, 
that  the  Jews,  though  now  subdued  by  the  Romans,  were 
yet  to  be  feared  for  their  compact  moral  force,  by  which 
they  could  easily  be  incited  to  resent  unremittingly  any 
offence  aimed  at  their  name  and  religion.  Is  this  admission, 
we  ask,  not  really  a  commendation  of  the  Jewish  character, 
although  we  own  that  Cicero  was  far  from  intending  it  as 
such  .'' 

But,  aside  from  this  point  of  view,  it  will  have  to  be 
admitted  by  every  reader  of  the  Oration,  that  the  Jews 
stand  out  therein,  in  his  whole  argument,  in  prominent 
favorable  relief  against  the  Greeks,  in  so  far,  at  least,  that 
he  had  seriously  to  recognize  and  notice  them  as  solid 
factors,  whereas  he  would  not  accord  even  this  much  to 
the  despised  Greek  nation,  in  denouncing  which  he  used  no 
caution  or  guarded  evasion  whatever,  paying  not  the  least 
regard  to  the  sentiments  of  its  people,  might  they  be  ever 
so  severely  outraged  by  his  speech. 

This  comparative  prominence  is  further  evident  from  the 
fact,  that  he  degraded  the  Asiatic  Greeks,  toward  the  end 
of  his  argument  against  their  witnesses,  by  holding  out  in 
scathing  illustrations  their  several  inferiority,  by  which  he 
wished  to  urge  implicitly  upon  the  judges,  that  they  were 
altogether  too  insignificant  to  deserve  even  a  transitory 
attention  by  the  judges  in  the  suit  they  had  brought.  No 
such  sort  of  vilifying  reflection  upon  the  Jews,  as  to  their 
social  and  human  merits  in  general,  was  attempted  by  him» 
however.  He  declares  them,  indeed,  forsaken  by  the 
"  immortal  gods,"  in  that  they  were  then  subjugated  to  the 
Roman  power.  But  this  he  did  only,  as  is  .obvious  from 
the  context,  to  demonstrate  to  the  judges,  that  the  Jewish 
religious  customs  need  not  be  respected  by  the  all-powerful 
Rome.  The  truth  of  the  Roman  worship  was  to  him  proved 
by  the  long  series  of  eminent  successes  with  which  his 
country    was    crowned.     Its    guardian     gods    were    conse- 


36  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

quently  the  only  true  ones.  The  Jewish  religion,  he  wished 
to  insinuate  on  the  other  hand,  could  by  no  means  be  true, 
or  the  Jews  must  have  succeeded  to  so  propitiate  their 
Deity,  that  they  would  be  spared  the  defeat  which  they 
had,  as  it  was  then  fresh  in  the  memory  of  the  Romans, 
actually  suffered. 

Having  thus  far,  by  the  parallel  of  Cicero's  position 
towards  the  Greeks  and  Jews  in  his  oration,  seen  that  the 
latter  fared  incomparably  better  at  his  hands  than  the 
former,  we  will  now  investigate  the  real  nature  of  the 
invectives  he  launched  out  against  them,  to  ascertain 
whether  there  is  truly  any  influence  of  Grecian  anti-Jewish 
literature  discoverable  in  it.  Is  it  perhaps,  we  ask,  to  be 
found  in  the  circumstance  that  he  denounced  their  annual 
gifts  of  sacred  money  ( Shekel  tribute)  as  a  "  barbarous 
superstition  .-' "  There  is  in  fact  nothing  foreign  noticeable 
in  it.  The  sharp  antagonism  to  the  exportation  of  that 
money  was  genuinely  Roman.  This  custom  of  the  Jews 
was,  for  fiscal  and  economical  reasons  alone,  obnoxious  to 
the  Roman  magistrates.  The  Senate  had,  so  Cicero  at 
least  brings  forward  in  the  same  oration,  already  before 
his  consulship,  and  afterwards  again  while  he  was  consul, 
prohibited  it.  Relying,  perhaps,  on  the  Roman  intolerance 
against  that  Jewish  custom,  the  spiteful  and  fanatical  Greeks 
of  the  eastern  provinces  had  later,  under  Augustus,  repeat- 
edly prevented  the  exportation  of  that  money  to  the  holy 
city.  It  happened  then  that  the  money — -designated,  by 
the  way,  'first  fruit,'  in  judicial  Roman  decrees  ;  see  Ant. 
xvi.  6,  7,  and  Philo,  Leg.  §40 — was,  on  or  after  having  been 
collected  in  various  cities  of  Asia  Minor  and  Libya,  either 
directly  stolen  from  the  Jews,  or  confiscated  under  pretense 
of  taxes,  which  the  Jews  had  practically  not  owed  (Ant.  ib. 
4,  5).  Augustus,  from  his  fair  and  generous  mind,  sent 
decrees  to  all  the  Roman  provinces,  that  no  magistrate 
should  permit  any  impediment  being  laid  in  the  way  of  the 
Jews  either  assembling  together  (which  assemblies  were 
always  eyed  with  suspicion  by  Roman  authorities ;  cp. 
Philo  ib.  §40)  to  make  arrangements  for  forwarding  the 
sacred  contributions  to  Jerusalem,  or  actually  conveying  it 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  37 

thither  (cp.  Ant.  ib.6  with  Philo  1.  c).  Marcus  A^rippa,  the 
general  and  son-in-law  of  Augustus,  declared  in  a  separate 
order,  doubtless  consequently  upon  the  emperor's  own  strict 
injunction,  the  violent  dispossession  of  the  Jews  of  their 
sacred  money  as  sacrilege  and  punishable  as  such  a  crime 
(Ant.  ib.  4). 

Cicero  was  indeed  not  so  fair-minded  as  to  tolerantly 
appreciate  that  pious  custom,  anxiously  cherished  by  the 
Jews  of  the  dispersion.  Nay,  he  was  bigoted  enough  to  stig- 
matize it  before  the  board  of  judges  as  "  a  barbarous  super- 
stition that  it  were  an  act  ot  dignity  to  resist."  He  surely 
evinced  a  large  degree  of  malicious  prejudice  in  this  denun- 
ciation. Yet  we  have  to  bear  in  mind,  that  his  speech  was  that 
of  a  barrister,  and  not  of  a  judicial  functionary.  He  was  in 
need  of  points  of  argument  in  favor  of  his  client,  and  in  the 
predicament  of  a  want  of  personal  accusations  or  insinua- 
tions to  be  used  against  his  antagonists,  he  would  resort  to 
vituperating  generalities,  such  as  the  religion  confessed  by 
the  entire  class  to  which  the  plaintiffs  at  court  belonged. 
That  even  from  this  view  his  abusive  language  was,  judged 
by  our  modern  principle  of  religious  tolerance,  a  cruel 
trespass  against  the  freedom  and  peace  of  conscience  of  a 
large  class  of  people  under  the  Roman  dominion,  and  to  be 
condemned  in  the  bitterest  terms  of  indignation,  no  one  is 
readier  than  we  to  admit.  But  not  only  must  we  not  put  a 
modern  critical  estimate  on  intolerant  utterances  of  persons 
of  remote  barbarous  ages,  the  language  of  a  barrister  calls 
even  at  all  times  for  its  own  peculiar  estimate,  and  can 
never  be  quoted  as  a  reliable  standard  of  the  thought  and 
sentiment  of  his  contemporary  fellow-citizens,  nor  even  of 
his  own  mind  and  disposition  as  man,  independently  of  the 
practice  of  his  profession.  Thus  we  must  not  judge  too 
harshly  of  Cicero's  invective  in  question.  The  less  so  when 
we  consider,  that  the  mode  employed  by  him  is  not 
eschewed  entirely  in  our  own  day,  even  in  civilized.  Christian 
countries.  Lawyers  still  usurp  the  privilege  of  assailing 
and  derogating  an  opponent  at  court  in  any  possible 
manner.  If  they  cannot  arraign  his  personal  character, 
they  are,  if  not  restrained  by  a  genuine  spirit  of  tolerance 


38  THE  SABBATH  IN   IHSTORY. 

and  its  ascendency  over  the  role  they  assume  at  court,  apt 
to  perpetrate  the  nuisance  of  holding  out  his  racial  descent 
or  religious  communion  to  a  reproach,  which  bigotry  and 
prejudice  have  always  ready  to  hand.  That  such  a  course 
is  most  reprehensible,  will  be  conceded  by  all  fair-minded 
people.  Yet  it  still  exists,  and  often  passes  uncensured  by 
our  tribunals. 

As  to  Cicero's  branding  that  Jewish  religious  custom  a 
"  barbarous  superstition,"  we  have  to  remark,  further,  that  he 
was  not  the  only  Roman  employing  the  last-named  epithet 
at  least,  when  speaking  of  the  religious  usages  of  the  Jews. 
Almost  every  known  Roman  writer  speaks  thus  disdainfully 
of  them.  It  was  even  peculiar  to  the  bigoted  Roman,  to 
stigmatize  every  foreign  worship,  not  the  Jewish  alone,  as  a 
worthless  superstition.^^  No  matter  how  lofty  in  its 
fundamental  conceptions  of  the  Divine  such  worship  might 
be,  it  had  to  be  condemned  as  unworthy  and  treated  with 
contempt,  because  it  was  in  opposition  to  his  own  venerated 
"  immortal  gods." 

The   exorbitant  pride  and   conceitful   patriotism    of  the 
high-born    Roman    bigot  were    the   chief  motives    for    the 
haughty   scorn,  not   unfrequently  mingled   with  jealousy^  ^ 
as  well,  which  he  held  constantly  in  store  for  all  non-Roman 
forms  and  modes  of  worship.     From  this  point  of  view  the 
monstrosity  of  Cicero's  attack  on  the  Jewish  religion  cer- 
tainly loses   the   offensive   force   of  peculiarity.     Nay,  the 
following    circumstance    may    even    have    the     virtue    of 
somewhat   mitigating    it.     In    speaking  of  the   religion  of 
the  Jews  we  find  the  term  "  superstition  "  used    by  Romans 
of    even    avowed    friendly    disposition  to  them,    and    that 
in  such  connections,  in   which  it  cannot   possibly   be    sup- 
posed to  have  been  inspired  by  an   invidious  or  slanderous 
mood  of  mind.     It  practically  occurs  in  decrees  issued   in 
their  favor  ;  see  those  published  in    behalf  of  the   Asiatic 
Jews    under    Caesar's    government,    in    the    ethnarchy    of 
Hyrcanus   II  ,  in    which   freedom    from    military   service  is 
awarded  them  for  their  objection  of  having  to  \'iolate  in  it 
the    laws    of   the    Sabbath    and     festivals,    also    the    food 
restraints,  which    observances  are  therein  denoted   as  the 
"superstition  the  Jews  are  under"  (Ant.  xiv,  lO,  13,  14,  16). 


FHE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  39 

Consistently  with  such  Roman  habit  of  expression,  the 
annual  contributions  of  the  Jews  to  the  Temple  treasury 
might  have  been  termed  a  superstition,  without  necessarily 
implying  a  derogatory  intent  and  giving  offence  to  a  Jewish 
hearer.  As  positive  we  can  only  assume  that  Cicero's 
adding,  in  his  oration,  the  adjective  "barbarous,"  and 
withal  his  railing  at  the  Jewish  religion  and  nation,  must 
have  trenchantly  affected  the  sensibilities  of  the  Jewish 
people  then  present  at  the  court. 

Be  all  this  as  it  may,  this  much  will  be  admitted  gener- 
ally as  beyond  any  doubt,  that  Cicero's  entire  assault  on 
the  Jews  in  that  oration  shows  not  the  slightest  vestige  of 
an  influence  of  extraneous  literature,  such  as  the  Alex- 
andrian, or  that  of  Apollonius  Molo,  his  teacher,  on  his 
mind  as  to  his  estimation  of  the  institutions  of  the  Jewish 
people.  There  is  positively  nothing  in  it  that  could  not  be 
accounted  for  by  his  mere  Roman  position,  virtually 
independent  of  any  Jew- hating  remarks  made  in  writings 
or  verbal  aspersions  of  any  Grecian  literator. 

As  to  Tacitus  whom  Dr.  Joel  also  points  out  as  having 
drawn  his  anti-Judaic  sentiments  from  Grecian  sources,  we 
admit  that  he,  at  once  the  most  circumstantial  and  venom- 
ous Roman  writer  on  Jewish  subjects,  had  indeed  got  his 
information  about  the  history  of  the  Jews,  that  is,  their 
origin  and  the  cause  of  their  exodus  from  Egypt,  from  a 
medley  of  Alexandrian  Greek  accounts.  But  does  this 
circumstance  indicate  in  the  least,  that  his  prejudice 
against  the  Jews  was  aroused  and  inspired  by  them  .-' 
Should  we  not  assume  rather,  that,  as  a  bigoted  and 
conceited  Roman,  he  had  cherished  a  deep  contempt  for 
the  Jews,  before  he  ever  read  any  of  those  works,  and  that 
it  was  just  this  previous  antagonism  to  them  that  made 
him  look  to  that  pagan  literature  for  information  as  to  their 
ancient  history,  when  "about  to  relate  the  catastrophe  of 
that  celebrated  city.'*"  (Hist.  v.  2.)  This  Grecian 
literature  with  its  Jew-detesting  fables  must  indeed  have 
been  found  most  convenient  to  him,  for  it  completely 
accorded  with  his  own  animus  regarding  the  Jews. 


40  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

The  story  of  their  violent  expulsion  from  Egypt  he 
adopted  from  "very  many  authors,"  who  "agree"  that  it 
happened  under  the  king  Bocchoris,  when  "  a  pes'Jlential 
disease  had  spread  over  Egypt."  Those  authors  were  not 
only  Lysimachus  (see  Ewald,  Hist,  of  Israel,  in  Joel  1.  c.  p. 
Ii6),  but  must  have  been,  since  Josephus  credits  only  the 
latter  with  fixing  the  period  of  the  expulsion  at  the  reign 
of  said  king  (Ag.  Ap.  ii.  2),  other  Grecian  writers  besides 
him — unless  it  be  that  Tacitus  scrupled  not  to  give  out 
Lysimachus'  individual  opinion  as  that  of  "  very  many- 
authors."  This  is  indeed  not  unlikely,  considering  that, 
much  as  his  own  report  in  Hist.  v.  3,  resembles  in  the 
outlines  the  description  which  Josephus  produces  as  that  of 
Lysimachus,  he  practically  deviates  from  him  in  about  the 
same  proportion  in  some  points,  as  he  is  found  to  agree 
with  him  in  others.  It  might  accordingly  be  that  he 
followed  Lysimachus  in  general,  but  garbled  his  accounts 
to  suit  his  own  temper  and  whim,  when  he  was  about  to 
improve  them  in  his  Histories. 

His  perusal  of  Apion's  writings  is  also  traceable  therein. 
The  literary  calumnies  about  the  Jewish  people  of  that 
Egyptian  writer  were  spread  broadcast  in  the  latter  part  of 
the  first  century,  C.  E.  Tacitus  rehearses  the  grotesque 
fable  reiterated  by  Apion  from  the  works  of  Posidonius 
and  Apollonius  Molo  (see  Ag.  Ap.  ii.  7),  that  the  figure  of 
an  ass  was  consecrated  in  the  sanctuary  of  the  Jewish 
temple  (Hist.  v.  5),  although  he  declares  in  the  subsequent 
chapter  according  to  the  truth,  that  they  "allow  no  images 
whatever  in  their  cities,  not  to  say  in  their  temples,"  and 
exhibits  later,  in  ch.  ix.,  the  "generally  known  fact"  that^ 
since  Pompey  had  on  his  entrance  in  the  Jewish  temple 
found  no  effigy  of  a  god  in  it,  it  was  in  all  its  apartments 
empty  of  any  such  material  representation  of  a  deity. 

His  use  of  Apion's  compositions  may,  farther,  be  inferred 
from  his  notice,  that  "  they  do  not  bestow  this  adulation 
(of  setting  up  or  venerating  their  likenesses)  to  kings,  nor 
this  honor  to  the  Caesars,"  which  sounds  much  like  a 
censure.     He  may  have  come  by  it  through  the  correlative 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  4I 

note  of  that  Egyptian  libeler  who,  as  Josephus  reports, 
(Ag.  Ap.  ii.  6),  had  charged  the  Jews  with  criminal  dis- 
loyalty for  not  erecting  images  to  the  emperors. 

He  had  also  apparently  copied  from  Apion  the  story  of  a 
six  days'  journey  of  the  Jews  (from  the  Arabian  desert ),  at 
the  end  of  which  they  landed  in  the  country  "  now  called 
Judea."  He  based  like  him,  in  the  subsequent  chapter,  the 
origin  of  the  Sabbath  on  the  termination  of  that  journey 
and  "the  rest  from  their  toils,"  not  reproducing,  however, 
that  furious  calumniator's  etymological  feat  of  the  Sabbath 
being  named  after  the  malady  in  their  groins — Sabbatosis  in 
Egyptian.  He  would  not  decide  upon  and  directly  adopt 
that  derivation,  either.  Indecision  was,  on  the  whole,  a 
prominent  mark  of  his  historical  excellence.  He  prefers 
many  a  time  to  enumerate  various  opinions  on  a  certain 
question,  and  then  to  let  the  reader  trouble  hirriself  about 
the  one  meriting  choice  out  of  the  rest.  This  mode  can  be 
tracked  through  his  entire  range  of  histories.  As  to  the 
Sabbath  he  narrates  side  by  side  with  the  above  derivation 
the  views  of  others,  that,  namely,  the  seventh  day  received 
its  distinction  by  the  Jews  from  the  honor  they  paid  to 
Saturn,  or  the  venerated  number  seven  by  which  "  most  of 
the  heavenly  bodies  complete  their  effects  and  course" 
(  Hist.  V.  3,  4  ;  cp.  Ag.  Ap.  ii.  2  ). 

There  may  be  possibly,  we  suggest,  some  more  parallels 
to  be  discovered  between  both  those  writers  as  to  subjects 
of  Jewish  religious  or  historical  import.  And  lastly,  Taci- 
tus may,  we  admit  in  the  premises,  have  read  every  line  of 
literature  composed  by  Grecian  writers  on  and  against 
Jews  that  was  extant  in  his  time.  But,  we  have  to  ask, 
does  all  this  indicate  in  the  remotest  way,  that  he  learned 
from  those  authors  contempt  for  Jews  and  Judaism,  as  Dr. 
Joel  advances  .■"  This  contempt  was,  as  we  expect  to  dem- 
onstrate convincingly  to  every  reader  in  the  sequel,  as 
much  a  home-growth  at  Rome,  as  it  was  in  Alexandria,  and 
had  no  need  of  being  "  imported  into  that  city  from  abroad," 
viz.,  from  Alexandria,  as  that  learned  author  insists. 


42  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

History  shows  variously  that  the  antagonism  to  the 
Jewish  people  in  pagan  countries  was  not  alone  domesti- 
cated in  the  latter  city,  but  also  in  other  large  centres  of 
Greek-speaking  countries,  such  as  Antioch,  Syria,  C^esarea, 
Palestine,  different  cities  of  Asia  Minor,  etc.  All  that 
can  be  imputed  to  the  influence  exerted  by  the  Alexandrian 
pagan  writers  of  Apion's  ilk  with  regard  to  the  Jews  is, 
that  they  have  more  or  less  contributed  towards  widening 
the  chasm  between  Jewish  and  Gentile  populations  in 
cities  of  the  Roman  empire  having  such  mixture  of 
inhabitants.  The  calumnies  they  embodied  in  their  works, 
may  have  found  their  way  into  the  minds  of  many  heathens, 
and  made  of  them  still  fiercer  opponents  of  the  Jews  than 
they  were  before.  Their  story  of  the  expulsion  of  the 
ancient  Israelites  from  Egypt  on  account  of  leprosy,  may 
in  particular  have  been  spread  broadcast,  and  seized  upon 
with  keen  relish  by  the  Grecian  barbarians.  'This  can  be 
deduced  from  the  instance  mentioned  by  Josephus,  Wars 
ii.  14,  5-  Yet,  we  contend,  the  real  and  original  causes  of 
pagan  hatred  and  contempt  for  Jews  are  not  to  be  sought 
in  contagious  transplantation.  Such  view  is  too  narrow, 
and,  in  fact,  as  we  will  presently  begin  to  prove,  thoroughly 
erroneous. 

We  are  able  to  account  for  the  pagan  aversion  to  the 
Jews,  first,  by  the  peculiarity  of  their  religious  usages  and 
their  diverse  worship  ;  secondly,  their  separateness,  caused 
for  the  most  part  by  that  diversity  ;  thirdly,  their  uncon- 
cealed disdain  for  pagan  polytheism  ;  and  fourthly,  their 
attempts  at  propogating  their  religion  and  making  converts 
of  polytheists  and  idolaters.  An  acrid  envy  at  Jewish 
success  and  prosperity  —  and  "  envy  soon  curdles  into  hate  " 
(Froude)  —  is  moreover  in  all  cases  to  be  presupposed  as  a 
ground-sentiment  among  the  generality  of  pagans.  And 
it  may,  lastly,  be  lioted  that  such  Roman  writers  of  the 
empire  as  Juvenal  and  Tacitus,  who  flourished  after  the 
bloody  Jewish  revolutionary  war,  and  partly  witnessed  yet 
the  insurrections  under  Trajan  and  Hadrian,  must,  from 
their  intense  proud  patriotism,  have  bitterly  resented  the 
ever  challenging  attempts  of  the  pertinacious  small  Jewish 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  43 

nation,  attempts  that  repeatedly  compelled  the  Remans  to 
expend  endless  sums  and  spend  enormous  force?,  that  they 
might  retain  hold  of  it.  The  rancorous  indignation  at  the 
continuous  troubles,  and  serious  and  heavy  losses  that  the 
Romans  had  to  suffer  from  the  Jews,  may  have  been  not 
the  least  of  the  elements  of  the  virulent  hate  that  made  up 
the  general  sentiment  and  disposition  of  those  men  against 
them.  If  the  reader  will  patiently  follow  us  as  we  will 
produce  the  relative  illustrations,  he  will,  we  hope,  be 
convinced  of  the  correctness  of  our  view  and,  on  the  other 
hand,  also  of  the  eccentricity  of  having  to  look  to 
Alexandria  as  the  hot-bed  of  all  pagan  Jew-hating.  He 
will  with  us  attribute  such  deplorable  excrescence,  whether 
existing  in  Alexandria  or  Rome,  to  the  causes  just  noted, 
either  combinedly  or  severally,  as  the  case  might  at  each 
juncture  have  been. 

From  Haman  to  Tacitus  the  diversity  of  the  Jewish 
religious  Law  had  formed  a  most  serious  object  of  pagan 
vexation.  Joel  had  evidently  judged  too  rashly  in  assigning 
to  it  only  a  "semblance  of  foundation,"  by  which  the  aver- 
sion nourished  by  the  heathen  against  the  Jewish  people 
might  be  explained  (' Blicke,'  etc.,  ii.  p.  107).  Haman's 
famous  charge  was  re-echoed  by  Tacitus  who  states  ( Hist. 
v.  4)  :  "In  order  to  bind  the  people  to  him  for  the  time  to 
come,  Moses  prescribed  to  them  a  new  form  of  worship, 
and  (one)  opposed  to  those  of  all  the  world  beside. 
Whatever  is  held  sacred  by  the  Romans,  with  the  Jews  is 
profane  ;  and  what  in  other  nations  is  unlawful  and  impure, 
with  them  is  permitted."  We  cannot  afford  to  enlarge  here 
on  the  malicious  falsehood  of  the  latter  assertion,  by  which 
he  outmatched  even  the  rancorous  Haman  of  old.  As  to 
the  former,  we  have  no  doubt  that  it  was  the  malevolent 
expression  of  a  sentiment  of  chagrin  harbored  by  thousands 
of  pagans  of  his  and  other  times  before  and  after  him. 
Those  "  new  rites,  contrary  to  all  other  mortals,"  annoyed 
them  pungently  to  the  core.  They  stood  forth  in  contin- 
uous and  conspicuous  opposition  to  their  polytheism,  and 
impressed  themselves,  on  the  intelligent  of  them  at  least,  as 
an  abashing  testimony  of  their  own    inferior  worship  and 

(4) 


44  T'HE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

rites.  That  they  were  constantly  chafed  by  it,  may  be 
gathered  from  Josephus'  rejoinder  to  Apion  ( i.  25  ),  in  which 
he  states  as  one  of  the  causes  of  the  reproaches  which  the 
Egyptians  cast  upon  the  Jews,  "the  difference  of  our  religion 
from  theirs,  etc."  It  is  surely  not  a  vague  supposition  of  the 
historian  that  a  hostile  sentiment  against  the  Jews  grew 
upon  the  thinking  Egyptians,  when  they  contrasted  their 
own  inferior  animal  worship  with  the  imageless  worship  of 
those  who  would  think  themselves  superior  by  allowing  no 
material  representations  of  the  Divine.  They  may  never 
have  owned  their  feeling  of  shame,  as  little  as  the  learned 
Roman  would  own  his,  on  comparing  his  national  polythe- 
ism with  the  purely  spiritual  Jewish  Monotheism  ;  but  it 
existed  nevertheless  in  their  heart  of  hearts,  pricking  them 
constantly  and  exciting  a  sharp  odium  against  the  con- 
fessors of  Judaism.  The  haughty  disdain  which  the  one  or 
the  other  of  them  vented  against  the  Jewish  religion  and 
rites  from  the  tower  of  their  pantheon  was,  we  believe, 
never  entirely  unmixed  with  a  certain  degree  of  that  feel- 
ing, overshadowed  though  it  was  by  the  irrepressible 
national  egotism,  and  sense  of  superiority  over  all  the  rest 
of  mankind,  almost  physically  peculiar  to  the  Roman 
patrician.  The  same  sentiments  may  properly  be  assumed 
to  have  prevailed  to  a  large  degree  with  all  other  heathens 
of  antiquity. 

The  diversity  of  the  religion  of  the  Jews  which  scan- 
dalized them  so  thoroughly,  was  as  a  rule  accompanied  by 
the  two  other  moments  mentioned  above,  viz.,  their 
separation  and  open  disdain  of  polytheism,  which  combi- 
nation must  have  vexed  them  the  more  strongly,  and 
confirmed  the  more  enduringly  the  breach  and  alienation 
between  the  two  classes. 

As  to  the  Jewish  separateness,  Tacitus  has  given  vent  to  j 
his  intense  annoyance  over  it,  specially  their  being  1 
"separate  as  to  meats  and  marriage  with  others"  (Hist. 
V.  5),  which  he,  as  it  would  appear  from  the  context  with  j 
the  preceding  sentence,  "but  against  all  others  they  have  a  [ 
hostile  ill-will,"  attributed  in  his  mind  to  a  mere  national  1 
and  social  aversion  to  other   nations,  not  being  capable,  or, 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  45 

at  any  rate,  disposed,  like  many  modern  decriers  of  the 
Jewish  clannishness  so-called,  to  account  for  it  by  merely 
religious  and  ethical  causes.  Even  the  initiatory  rite  of 
the  Jews  he  would  not  explain  in  a  purely  religious  bearing, 
asserting  of  it  that  "  it  was  instituted  by  them,  that  they 
might  be  known  by  this  distinctive  mark"  (ib).  The  trend 
of  this  insinuation  logically  agrees  with  his  previous 
accusation,  that  the  Jews  have  a  "hostile  ill-will  against 
all  others." 

The  same  nationally  antagonistic  separateness  Juvenal 
imputes  to  the  Jews,  or  rather  the  fully  Judaized  children  of 
proselytes  from  polytheism,  when  he  says  (Sat.  xiv.  103-4): 
"They  show  the  way  to  none  who  does  not  observe  the 
same  religious  rites  with  them  ;  and  they  lead  to  the 
sought-for  fountain  only  the  circumcised."  In  about  the 
same  strain  the  before-mentioned  Lysimachus  had  charged 
the  Jews.  He  imputed  to  Moses  that  he  urged  the 
Israelites  "to  have  no  kind  regards  for  any  man,  nor  give 
good  counsel  to  any,  but  always  to  advise  them  for  the 
worst"  (Ag.  Ap.  i.  34).  As  to  Juvenal's  strictures  it  may 
be  observed  here  in  passing,  that  they  were  not  so  much 
directly  aimed  at  Jews  and  Judaizers,  as  at  Roman  parents 
as  such,  against  whom  he  inveighs  in  that  satire  for  the 
evil  examples  they  were,  as  he  claims,  setting  to  their 
children.  As  a  specimen  of  them  he  produces,  among 
others,  that  Judaizing  peculiarity.  Moreover,  it  must  be 
owned,  as  we  will  more  explicitly  notice  hereafter,  that  he 
was  by  far  no  such  virulent  hater  of  the  Jews  as  Tacitus. 

From  the  times  of  those  pagan  writers  to  the  modern 
era  in  which  a  Goldwin  Smith  and  his  congenial  brethren 
in  prejudice  and  malice  flourish,  an  immense  line  of 
accusers  of  the  Jews  of  a  hostilly  exclusive  disposition 
towards  Gentiles  has  thriven,  all  of  them  blinded  by 
the  obdurate  prepossession,  or  at  all  events  working  on 
the  pretext,  that  the  Jewish  separation  as  to  eating  and 
connubial  observances  was  due  to  an  hereditary  and  invid- 
iously cherished  antipathy  to  all  other  people  not  belonging 
to  the  Jewish  race  or  religious  community.  The  distance 
of    nearly    eighteen    hundred    years    between    the    life    of 


46  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Tacitus  and  Goldvvin  Smith  has  not  essentially  altered  that 
main  accusation.  The  last-named  celebrity,  in  an  article 
published  a  decade  ago,  basing  on  the  refusal  of  the  Jews 
to  intermarry  with  the  Gentile  English  people  his  assump- 
tion that  they  cannot  be  real  patriots,  argues  as  follows: 
"  Nothing  is  more  destructive  of  those  relations  with  the 
rest  of  the  community  on  which  patriotism  depends,  than 
the  refusal  of  intermarriage."  And  he  charges  them  with 
being  a  "jealously  separate  race  '-  '^-  -  refusing  to 
mingle  with  humanity,  and  drawing  on  themselves  the 
hatred  of  the  nations."  He  has  proved  himself  in  perfect 
accord  with  old  Tacitus,  differing  from  him  only  in  this 
respect  that  the  latter,  not  having  before  him  a-  blood- 
stained volume  of  records  of  Gentile  persecutions  of  the 
Jews,  such  as  the  seventeen  hundred  years  subsequent  to 
his  lifetime  exhibit,  did  not  feel  himself  called  upon  to  deal 
with  the  problem,  how  the  Jews  "  drew  on  themselves  the 
hatred  of  the  nations"  so  much,  as  to  note  the  "hostile 
ill-will  (he  imagined)  the  Jews  bore  to  all  others." 

For  our  present  purpose  we  suggest  in  this  connection 
that,  as  little  as  Dr.  Joel  would  be  inclined  to  pronounce 
Goldwin  Smith's  Jew-hating  erudition  as  derived  from 
Alexandrian  sources,  so  little  must  Tacitus  be  supposed  to 
have  drawn  his  antagonism  to  Jews  from  them.  There  is 
indeed  no  conceivable  warrant  for  such  a  supposition.  The 
Gentiles,  everywhere  on  the  globe,  whether  in  the  east  or 
west,  have  ever  taken  offence  at  the  Jewish  separation, 
Hiainly  evinced  by  their  refusal  of  participating  in  their 
meals  or  intermarrying  with  them.  They  accounted  for  it 
by  a  national  or  personal  aversion,  believing  or  at  least 
representing  it  as  inherent  in  the  minds,  and  continuously 
tostered  through  the  optional  and  intentional  practice  of 
the  Jews.  That  religious  and  ethical  motives  were  the 
real  cause  of  that  separatism,  to  which  came  considerations 
of  ceremonial  purity,  impeding  and  forbidding  the  mutual 
intercourse  of  both  classes  more  or  less  seriously,  according 
to  the  greater  or  lesser  rigor  with  which  those  considera- 
tions were  popularly  heeded  in  the  various  periods  of 
Jewish  history,  they  could  or  would  not  accept  and  realize. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  4/ 

A  third  concurrent  element  in  the  growth  of  pagan  hatred 
to   Jews,  equally    in    Rome    and    Alexandria,   and    one    of 
decided  moment,  although  modern  Jewish  writers  as  a  rule 
take  no  note  of  it,   was  their  implacable  and  irrepressible 
abhorrence  of  the  pagan  polytheism  and  idolatry.     Tacitus 
was  truly  correct  in  stating  (  Hist.  v.  5),  that  those  Gentiles 
who  embrace  the  Jewish  religion  (as  genuine  converts)  are 
early  impressed  with  nothing   sooner  than  to  "contemn  the 
gods  etc."     The  first  thing  inculcated  on  the  mind  of  the 
pagan    applicant   for   reception    into   Judaism,    was   indeed 
invariably,  and  in  all  countries,  the  abandonment  of  poly- 
theistic worship  and  total  abstraction  of  the  mind  from  such 
worship.     This  was  the  absolute,  indispensable  condition, 
under   which   any  one    heathen    could    ever   expect    to    be 
permitted    to   enter  the    fold   of  Judaism.       The. negation 
of  polytheism   and  idolatry  was,  too,  valued  so  highly,  that 
Rabbinism  raised   it,  rather  hyperbolically,  it  is  true,  to  a 
state  of  positive,  practical  profession  of  Judaism.     See  B. 
Megillah  f.  13  :     "He  who  rejects  false  worship  is  called  a 
Jew."     Compare  also  Sifre,  Numb.  §  iii:     "He  who  denies 
idolatry,   owns    (implicitly)     the    (obligation  of  the)    entire 
Torah,"  or,  as    this   frequently   employed   sentence  is   con- 
strued in   B.  Nedarim  f.  2^:   "One  who  denies  idolatry,  is 
accounted  a  practical  observer  of  all  the  laws  of  the  Torah." 
Monotheism  being  the  foundation-principle  of  Judaism,  a 
proselyte  had  indeed,   as  Tacitus  alleges,  to  be  taught  first 
to  contemn    the  gods    of    heathenism.      The    unparalleled 
jealousy  of  the  Jews  for  their  pure  monotheistic  creed  had, 
moreover,    raised    that    contempt    to    a    fierce,    horror-like 
sentiment,  of  which  they  made  no  secret,  wherever  in  the 
Graeco-Roman  world  they  witnessed  the  practical  folly  of 
idolatry.     At  rimes  it  would  even   develop  into  a  polemical 
position,  and   this  in  particular,  when   they  were  provoked 
by    hostile    treatment    at    the    hands    of   their  polytheistic 
neighbors.     This   is  not  only  reasonably  to   be   supposed, 
but  can  be  deduced  from  the  following  report  of  Josephus 
(Ant.  xix.  5,  3).     The  emperor  Claudius  issued  an  edict  to 
all  the  cities  of  the  empire,  enjoining  the  pagan  populations 
to  respect  the  Jewish  rights  and  privileg:;s,  that  is,  not  to 


48  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

"hinder"  them  in  the  observance  of  their  "hereditary 
(reh'gious)  customs,"  adding  advisedly  :  "  And  I  do  charge 
them  (the  Jews)  also  to  use  this  my  kindness  rather 
modestly,  and  not  to  show  a  contempt  of  the  religious  rites 
(deisidaimonias)  of  the  other  nations,  but  to  keep  their 
own  laws  "  (without,  namely,  at  the  same  time  disparaging 
the  worship  of  others).  The  like  allusion  seems  to  have 
been  intended  by  the  same  emperor  in  his  special  order  for 
the  city  of  Alexandria  (ib.  2),  that  both  parties,  the  Jews 
and  Gentiles,  should  "  employ  the  greatest  care  that  no 
dissension  should  arise  (between  one  another)  after  the 
promulgation  of  this  edict." 

Are  we  not  entitled  to  discover  in  this  circumstance  an 

example,  that  the  Jews  were  not  always  merely  apologetic  j 

as  to  their  own  creed,  but  now  and  then  also  aggressive  I 
against    the    dignity    of   heathen    divinities    and    religious 

usages  ?     We  admit  that  this  state  of  aggressiveness  was,  i 

as  a  rule,  brought  on  by  the  frequent  outrages  perpetrated  \ 

by  the  rancorous  Grecians  on  the  Jews  and  the  enormous  ; 

scorn  constantly  exhibited  towards  them  in  society.     They  | 

would  through  such  insulting  treatment  be  embittered  to  I 

such  a  degree,  that  they  could  not,  even  in  the  intervals  of  1 

comparative    peace,   suppress   their   wounded  feelings  and  i 
irritated  temper  on  those  occasions,  offering  them  a  chance 
to  retaliate  on  their  oppressors  by  some  scornful  strictures 

on  the  extravagant  folly  and  fallacy   of  their   worship    or  j 

impurity   of   their   lives.     Had    they    been    ordinarily    and  j 

constantly  treated  with  indulgence  by  their  pagan  fellow-  | 

countrymen,    they    would    possibly    never    have   uttered   a  j 

reviling  word  on  their  belief  and  rites.     Yet  this  much  is  at  ; 

least  shown  by  the  aforesaid  imperial  act,  that  the  Jews  living  \ 

in   various  cities    of    numerous    Syro-Grecian    populations  j 

were  then,  as  they  were  doubtless  before  and  afterwards,  ; 

not  always  suffering  from  pagan  assaults  and  insults,  but  j 

occasionally  maintaining  even  an  offensive  attitude  towards  , 
their  worship.     Comp.  Hausrath,  '  N.  T.  Times,*  i.  178,  who 

likewise     maintains,    from     respective     passages     of    the  ] 

Apocrypha,  that  the  Jews  really  derided  polytheism,  and  ' 

that  therefore  Pliny's  (Hist.   Nat.  xiii.),    judgment  on  the  j 


.J 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  49 

Jews  as  being  a  "  nation  noted  for  their  insults  to  the 
gods,"  had  a  foundation  in  fact.  Let  us  observe  here  in 
passing,  that  in  Pliny  we  find  another  illustration  of  the 
blind  hatred  of  the  greatest  Roman  intellects  to  the  Jews, 
a  hatred  that  made  them  commit  the  grossest  inconsist- 
ency, rather  than  concede  to  them  the  credit  of  a  pure  and 
commendable  worship.  Pliny  himself  derided  the  gods  of 
the  popular  mythology  as  childish  fables.  He  was  a  radical 
pantheist,  and  one  not  of  the  moderate  Stoic  type,  for 
he  would  not  think  of  spiritualizing  the  popular  divinities, 
nor  could  he  decide  whether  the  belief  in  Providence  was 
profitable  to  mankind.  Nature  was  his  god  ;  see  on  his 
system,  Friedlaender,  Darstell.  aus  der  Sittengesch.  Roms, 
iii.  483  sq.  Yet  the  Jews  had  to  be  held  out  to  scorn  for 
their  contempt  of  the  numberless  gods  of  heathendom. 
He  himself  had  declared  it  as  a  mark  of  human  weakness 
to  inquire  after  the  form  of  the  Deity  —  if  there  were  any. 
But  the  Jewish  rejection  and  detestation  of  idols  was  an 
insult  to  the  gods  ! 

The  same  has  to  be  remarked  on  Juvenal,  his  con- 
temporary. In  his  thirteenth  satire  he  mocks  at  the 
immense  crowd  of  the  then  national  deities,  and  speaks 
of  them  in  a  manner  which  certainly  must  have  shocked 
the  religious  Roman  readers  and  appeared  to  them  as 
the  most  blasphemous  assault.  Yet  he  had  nevertheless 
no  word  of  recognition  for  the  imageless  worship  of  the 
one  invisible  God  of  the  Jews,  and  of  appreciation  of  their 
religious  customs.  We  have,  on  the  other  hand,  to  bear  in 
mind  that  even  he  could  not  rid  himself  of  the  native  Roman 
attachment  for  the  immortal  gods,  and  would  not  only  not 
disadvise  others  from  sacrificing  to  the  divinities  (see  Sat. 
354)  '55).  but  once  himself  brought  an  offering  to  Ceres 
Helvina  (Friedlaender,  1.  c.  p.  490). 

We  may  gather  our  supposition,  further,  from  Rabbini- 
cal sources.  Idol  and  polytheistic  worship  are  by  Rabbis 
of  the  first  and  second  centuries  C.  E.,  arraigned  sarcas- 
tically in  disputations  with  cultured  pagans  as  well  in 
Rome  as  in  Palestine  (see  B.  Adodah  Zarah,  f.  44,  55,  et 


50  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

alias  ;  comp.  also  with  that  passage  of  f.  55,  the  identical 
argumentation  used  in  the  monotheistic  or  monarchic 
Jewish  Christian  production,  the  Clementine  Homilies,  ix. 
6,  by  Peter,  in  his  alleged  address  at  Tripolis). 

It  seems,  furthermore,  to  have  been  a  settled  rule  among 
the  Jews,  that  meats  and  drinks  sacrificially  consecrated  to 
idols,  were  to  be  regarded  not  only  as  prohibited  for  use, 
but  as  ceremonially  defiling  as  a  corpse  (see  B.  Ab.  Zar.  f. 
30,  et  passim). 

This  Jewish  horror  for  things  sacrificed  to  idols  passed 
even,  we  may  observe  here  in  passing,  over  to  the  Jewish 
Christian  church.  Not  only  do  the  Clementine  Homilies 
contain  a  solemn  interdiction  of  sacrificial  meat  of  the 
pagans  to  the  Gentile  Christians  (vii.  4,  8),  which  is 
denounced  as  such  an  abomination  that  it  is  by  comparison 
designated  "the  repast  of  demons"  (ib.  8).  But  the 
Apostolic  decrees,  attributed  to  the  council  of  the  Jewish 
Christian  church  of  Jerusalem,  enjoin  the  same  abstinence 
on  Gentile  converts  to  Christianity  (Acts.  xv).  Whatever 
may  be  declared  against  the  authenticity  of  this  narrative 
of  Acts  (see  Baur,  '  Paul  the  Apostle,'  and  the  author  of 
'Supernatural  Religion'),  so  much  is  at  least  indisputable, 
that  those  decrees  reflect  the  Jewish  Christian  sentiment 
and  determination,  which  these  sectaries  had  carried  over 
into  their  new  affiliations.  They  continued  to  feel  the  same 
implacable  horror  for  all  things  offered  to  idols,  as  they  felt 
before  they  severed  their  connection  with  orthodox  Judaism, 
and  would  consequently  insist  on  those  who  turned  to  their 
creed  from  heathendom,  to  abstain  from  them  likewise.  It 
was  Paul  alone  who  would  declare  idol-meat  an  indifferent 
thing  to  those  Christian  believers  who  had  "knowledge" 
(i  Cor.  viii). 

That  the  decided,  open  contempt  with  which  alike  Jews 
and  Jewish  Christians  treated  the  idolatrous  practices, 
feasts,  and  consecrated  meats  and  drinks  which  they 
noticed  among  pagan  worshipers,  will  not  infrequently 
have  led  to  contentious  scenes,  cannot  be  doubted.  Jewish 
scrupulosity  had,  moreover,  not  only  denounced  wine 
really  consecrated   to  idols  as  unlawful  for  use,  but  prohib- 


THE  SABBATH  IN  IHTSORY.  5  I 

ited  all  the  wine  made  by  pagans  (Mishnah  Abod.  Zar.  ii. 
3).  And  at  a  certain  epoch  of  the  first  century  C.  E.  (not 
during  the  Jewish  revolutionary  war  though,  between  65  - 
70,  as  Graetz,  'Hist,  etc'  iii.  575,  suggests,  for  already  in 
the  time  of  Josephus'  administration  of  Galilee  the 
objection  to  the  use  of  oil  made  by  heathens  had  passed 
as  a  fixed  rule,  and  could  therefore  not  have  been  recently 
introduced)  an  interdict  was  put  on  the  purchase  of  bread 
and  oil  from  pagans. 

These  and  the  like  authoritative  Jewish  restrictions 
necessarily  implied  to  the  heathen  people  who  could  not 
help  taking  note  of  it,  the  imputation  to  them  of  an 
abhorrible  religious  debasement  and  a  deterring  impurity 
of  life  by  the  Jewish  people. 

In  general,  it  was  everywhere  in  the  Graeco-Roman 
world  known,  that  the  Jews  despised  their  polytheistic 
worship  and  rites.  This  necessarily  created  and  kept  up  a 
stinging  grudge  against  the  professors  of  Judaism.  It  was, 
as  we  may  here  add,  partly  from  this  grudge  that  the 
heathen  Syro-Grecians  contested  the  claims  of  the  Jews  to 
live  together  and  enjoy  equal  rights  with  them. 

Such  a  small  number  of  dissenters —  as  they  would  hold 
the  Israelites  —  should  presume  to  scorn  the  established, 
almost  universal  worship  of  the  gods,  and  set  themselves 
with  their  own  against  the  powerful  nations  of  the  earth  ! 
This  was  too  much  for  them  to  bear  without  bitter 
resentment.  They  would  at  times  object  that,  if  the  Jews 
wanted  to  enjoy  equal  privileges  with  them,  they  should 
also  adopt  the  same  worship  with  them  ;  see  Ant.  xii.  3,  2  ; 
Ag.  Ap.  ii.  6.  The  same  compatriots,  so  they  argued  alike 
in  Grecian  countries  and  in  Rome,  should  have  the  same 
national  religion  in  common,  which  was  polytheism.  That 
the  Jews  would  not  only  not  recognize  the  national  divini- 
ties and  participate  in  the  solemn  rites  performed  in  their 
honor,  but  despise  the  latter  as  irrational  and  reject  the 
former  as  non-entities,  could  not  but  grievously  offend  and 
provoke  the  heathen  mind  (comp.  Tacitus'  and  Pliny's 
reproachoe  mentioned  before). 


52  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Lastly,  we  have  to  mention  as  one  of  the  chief  causes  of 
pagan  contempt  for  Jews,  their  proselytizing  efforts  and 
successes,  which  vexed  the  Roman  men  of  letters  as  well 
as  some  of  the  bigoted  emperors  of  the  first  century  C.  E., 
to  an  intolerable  degree.  The  Jewish  religion  had  at  that 
period  made  stupendous  headway  and  very  marked  inroads 
upon  paganism  everywhere  in  the  Roman  empire.  No  impor- 
tation of  Alexandrian  literary  vituperations  was  therefore 
needed,  as  Dr.  Joel  opines,  to  incense  Roman  literators 
against  the  Jews.  The  immense  proportions  Jewish  prop- 
agandism  had  assumed,  were  alone  sufficient  to  make  a 
bigoted  Tacitus  pour  out  all  his  gall,  or  the  satirists  vent 
all  their  spleen,  on  the  Jewish  people.  Not  only  was  their 
national  pride  sorely  offended  at  noticing  their  country 
deities,  with  their  many  peculiar  services,  festivals  and 
ceremonies  neglected,  and  many  of  their  countrymen 
devoted  to  a  religion  so  utterly  antagonistic  to  their 
polytheism,  and  which  was  professed  by  a  people  held  in 
all  respects  so  much  inferior  to  the  Roman,  and  subdued 
under  their  rule.  But  the  Jewish  religion  being  conceived 
as  a  lazv  demanding  of  its  votaries  a  mode  and  conduct  of 
life  so  different  to  the  Roman  in  many  essential  points,  they 
found  in  it  a  standard  of  civil  life  radically  conflicting  with 
their  own,  and  menacing  by  its  spread  the  predominance 
of  their  own  law,  which  they  believed  should  alone  govern 
as  far  as  the  imperial  dominion  reached.  This  filled  the 
pure-blooded,  proud  Roman  with  a  sort  of  pious  horror. 

To  substantiate  our  assertion,  we  will  produce  the 
respective  utterances  of  Tacitus,  Juvenal  and  Seneca. 
Tacitus,  after  reviewing  some  of  the  "new  rites"  of  the 
Jews  "  contrary  to  the  rest  of  the  mortals,"  together  with 
his  interpretation  of  their  origin  and  import,  and  setting 
forth  their  distinctiveness  as  to  meals,  marriage  and 
circumcision,  says  :  "  Those  gone  over  to  their  religion 
adopt  the  same  custom  (of  circumcision),  and  they  are 
early  impressed  with  nothing  sooner  than  to  contemn  the 
gods,  to  cast  off  their  (allegiance  to  theirj  country,  and  to 
despise  their  children  and  brothers "  (Hist.  v.  5).  It  is 
evident  from  this  description  that  he  had  seen  and  heard  of 
many  good  Romans  attached  to  Judaism  in  preference  to 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  53 

the  time-honored  worship  of  the  guardian  gods,  even  to 
such  an  extent  that  they  would  undergo  the  painful  rite  of 
initiation  in  its  faith.  Not  the  downfall  of  the  Jewish  State, 
nor  the  temporal  and  social  degradation  of  the  Jewish 
people  ensuing  from  it,  had  refrained  those  converts  from 
entering  the  pale  of  the  politically  annihilated  nation. 
This  roused  his  ire  to  the  utmost  pitch.  He  inwardly 
chafed  at  a  phenomenon  so  astounding,  and  at  the  same 
time  so  humiliating  to  the  national  religion  of  his  country. 
Conversion  to  Judaism  was  to  him  a  total  aversion  from 
Romanism,  in  its  comprehensive  politico-religious  sense. 

Juvenal,  although  by  far  not  so  virulent  in  his  utterances 
on  the  Jews,  censures  those  "  happening  to  have  a  Sabbath- 
fearing  father  (that  is,  one  converted  to  Judaism),  and  who 
(consequently)  adore  nothing  but  the  clouds  and  the 
divinity  of  heaven  ;  *  *  -:^  but  they  are  used  to  contemn 
the  Roman  lazvs,  and  learn,  observe  and  fear  (in  preference) 
the  Jewish  laxv,  all  that  Moses  has  handed  down  in  a  secret 
volume"  (Sat.  xiv).  Here  we  have  a  distinct  arraignment 
of  the  Jewish  observances,  believed  to  be  subversive  of 
loyalty  to  Romanism  in  all  its  relations,  which  radical 
transformation  he  imputes  to  all  those  proselytes  and  their 
children,  who  saw  fit  to  forsake  the  religion  of  their  native 
country. 

In  the  same  strain  had  Seneca,  a  few  decades  before,  cast 
his  bitter  reproach  upon  the  Jews  for  their  propagandism, 
saying  :  "  As  meanwhile  the  (religious)  custom  of  that 
wicked  nation  has  gained  strength  to  such  an  extent,  that 
it  is  already  received  throughout  all  lands,  the  vanquished 
have  (thus)  given  laws  to  their  conquerors"  (see  Augustine, 
De  Civitate  Dei,  vi.  ii).  He  nored  the  vast  and  steadily 
growing  advancement  of  Jewish  belief  and  practice  in  the 
empire,  which  appeared  to  him,  as  to  many  other  Romans, 
as  a  substitution  of  a  foreign  set  of  laws  for  the  Roman, 
and  could  in  his  indignation  at  such  a  state  of  affairs  not 
but  discant  contemptuously  on  the  Jewish  propagandist 
impetuosity.  It  was  not  the  Jewish  religion  he  attacked, 
but  the  effrontery  of  the  Jewish  people  to  attempt  sup- 
planting the  Roman  worship  and  rites  by  their  own  among 
the  Gentiles. 


54  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

The  Jewish  proselytism  so  eminently  carried  on  since 
the  reign  of  Augustus  and  perhaps  already  before,  was 
viewed  by  representative  Romans  with  mingled  rancor  and 
jealousy.  In  the  Augustan  age  we  find  the  poet  Horace 
already  alluding  to  the  zealous  propagandism  of  the  Jews, 
in  the  passage,  "and  just  as  the  Jews,  we  will  compel  thee 
to  join  this  (the  poet's)  crowd"  (Sat.  i,  4).  This  unmis- 
takably shows  that  the  zeal  for  spreading  their  faith,  in 
Rome  at  least,  had  then  been  very  active  among  Jewish 
enthusiasts.^^  Ovid,  Horace's  younger  contemporary,  who 
also  flourished  mainly  in  the  period  of  Augustus,  may  too 
have  alluded  to  such  state  of  things,  in  his  'Remedy  of 
Love.'  In  it  he  advises  the  young  man  suffering  from  the 
malady  of  voluptuousness,  to  strenously  engage  in  some 
kind  of  work,  since  idleness  promotes  sensuous  passions, 
or  to  journey  away  from  the  place  of  temptation,  and  not 
to  "  fear  showers,  nor  let  the  Sabbath  of  the  stranger  detain 
him,  nor  yet  the  Allia,  so  well  known  for  its  disasters"  (the 
memorial  day  of  a  defeat  which  the  Romans  had  once 
sustained). 

While  we  must  not  press  this  point  too  far  as  an  evidence 
of  conversions  to  Judaism  among  the  people  of  Rome  in 
the  poet's  days,  for  it  is  possible,  as  Riley  in  his  annotation 
to  that  passage  observes,  "  that  the  Romans  in  some 
measure  imitated  the  Jews  in  their  observance  of  their 
Sabbath,  by  setting  apart  every  seventh  day  for  the  worship 
of  particular  deities" — a  question  to  which  we  will  later 
recur — ,  and  that  accordingly  the  outward  adoption  of 
the  Sabbath  by  some  Romans  was  not  a  real,  not  even  a 
half-conversion,  since  even  this  had  to  be  attended  by  an 
unconditional  surrender  of  every  sign  of  polytheism  ;  and, 
further,  because  that  passage  easily  admits,  on  the  other 
hand,  of  the  interpretation,  that  the  poet  did  not  at  all 
advert  in  his  mind  to  any  sort  of  religious  observance  of 
the  Sabbath  by  some  Romans,  but  merely  to  the  circum- 
stance that,  as  the  seventh  day  was  commonly  known  as 
one  "not  suited  for  the  transaction  of  business"  by  the 
Jews  (Ovid,  'Art  of  Love,'  1.  I.),  it  was  by  some  supersti- 
tious   Romans,    who    were    though    entirely    bare    of    any 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  55 

attachment  for  Judaism,  feared  as  an  ill-omened  season  for 
beginning  any  new  work  or  setting  out  on  a  journey  on  it, 
and  that  he  consequently  wished  solely  to  encourage  the 
young  man,  whom  he  addressed,  not  to  mind  such  scaring 
delusions  at  all :  we  yet  have  to  recognize  this  much  as  a 
certain  result  from  the  poet's  description,  that  the  influence 
of  Judaism  had  made  itself  somehow  felt  in  the  Roman 
society  of  his  time. 

Especially  so,  when  we  hold  in  view  that  the  noted 
passage  in  the  Art  of  Love,  which  we  reproduce  later, 
allows  the  interpretation,  that  Roman  ladies  of  pagan 
nationality  were  accustomed  to  visit  synagogues  on  the 
Sabbath  of  the  Jews.  This  would  show  from  the  poet's  writing, 
that  the  Jewish  Sabbath  had  actually  awakened  the  sincere 
religious  interest  of  native  Romans  in  his  time. 

The  Jewish  propagandist  zeal  did  not  diminish  under 
Tiberius,  but  seems  rather  to  have  grown  apace  as  the 
empire  continued.  To  the  epoch  of  this  emperor  belongs 
the  reproach  made  by  Jesus  to  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees, 
that  they  "  compass  sea  and  land  to  make  one^  ^  proselyte  " 
(Matt.  xiii.  15).  While  the  imputation  of  their  traversing 
the  whole  earth  to  catch  only  one  pagan  soul  is  on  its  face 
an  exaggeration,  and  one  doubtless  due  to  the  irritated 
temper  of  Jesus  ;  and  while  the  student  of  history  will  at 
all  events  have  to  pronounce  the  charge  of  Jesus  as  one- 
sided and  inspired  by  partisan  passion,  since  it  is  an 
undeniable  fact  that  the  Asmonean  princes  were,  as 
outspoken  and  fanatic  Sadducees,  by  far  the  most  aggressive 
and  obtrusive  propagandists  Judaism  ever  produced,  so 
that  it  cannot  be  seen  why  the  one  party,  the  Pharisaic 
doctors  and  votaries,  should  be  charged  with  an  excess  of 
proselytizing  zeal,  and  no  such  reproach  uttered  against 
the  other ;  we  have  yet  no  valid  reason  to  doubt  the 
authenticity  of  Jesus'  accusation  in  its  substance,  namely, 
that  proselytism  was  in  his  time  very  brisk  among  the 
Jewish  people. 

We  will  at  once  adduce  another  instance  from  which 
this  may  be  inferred  for  the  period  of  Tiberius'  reign. 
An  account  of  a  persecution  of  the  Jews  of  Rome  by 
this    emperor  is  preserved  in  history.    It  is  presented  by 


56  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

the  four  authors,  Josephus,  Philo,  Suetonius  and  Tacitus. 
The  Jewish  and  Egyptian  cults  must  at  that  time  have 
made  such  rapid  encroachment  in  the  eternal  city,  that  the 
authorities  were  deeply  alarmed,  and  concluded  to  proscribe 
and  suppress  them.  Tacitus  (Annals  ii.  85)  who  relates 
the  fact,  that  under  Tiberius  *'  action  was  also  taken 
concerning  the  expulsion  of  the  Egyptian  and  Jewish 
rites,"  and  Suetonius  (Tiberius,  xxxvi.)  who  reports  of  him 
that  he  "  restrained  the  foreign  religious  customs,  the 
Egyptian  and  Jewish  rites,"  leave  no  doubt  that  the 
measures  of  repression  related  further  on  by  those  writres 
were  puritanical^ "^  in  their  character,  undertaken,  namely, 
to  cleanse  the  Roman  polytheistic  institutions  of  intruding 
foreign  elements,  prominent  among  which  were  the  Jewish 
and  Egyptian,  which  seem  to  have  then  made  the  largest 
headway  in  the  capital.  Philo  who,  in  passing,  attributes 
the  persecution  then  enacted  against  the  Roman  Jews  to 
the  promptings  of  Tiberius'  privy-councillor,  Sejanus,^'' 
exonerating  the  emperor  entirely  from  its  opprobrium  (Leg. 
§  24  ;  cp.  Ag.  Flaccus  §  i),  represents  indirectly  its  origin 
to  some  accusations  laid  against  them.  Of  what  nature 
they  were,  he  does  not  signify.  He  merely  states  that 
Tiberius  discovered  immediately  after  Sejanus'  death,  that 
*'  the  accusations  which  had  been  brought  against  the  Jews 
who  were  dwelling  in  Rome,  were  false  calumnies,  inven- 
tions of  Sejanus  ;"  and  also  that  the  emperor  sent  official 
declarations  to  all  the  governors  of  the  provinces,  comfort- 
ing the  Jews  everywhere,  that  "the  punishment^ ^  was  not 
executed  upon  all,  but  only  on  the  guilty  ;  and  they  were 
but  few." 

While  we  have  to  note  with  regret  that  that  Jewish 
author  who,  as  the  contemporary  of  Tiberius,  could  have 
given  us  the  best  and  truest  information  on  the  offence 
committed  by  or  at  least  charged  on  the  Jews,  as  also  on 
the  character  of  their  penalty,  was  yet  utterly  silent  on 
these  points,  we  are  nevertheless  not  left  wholly  uncertain 
about  the  reference  he  made  in  his  mind  in  regard  to  them. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  5/ 

The  analogy  offered  by  the  two  before-named  Gentile 
writers,  throws  sufficient  light  on  the  facts  in  question  as 
they  were  present  in  Philo's  mind,  though  he  did  not 
explicitly  state  them.  It  was  undeniably  the  Jewish  propa- 
gandism  at  which  the  Roman  authorities  had  taken  grievous 
umbrage,  and  for  which  they  proceeded  with  vengeance 
against  the  Jews.  This  our  supposition  is  not  only  not 
contradicted  by  Josephus  who,  in  Ant.  xviii.  3,  5,  puts 
forth  a  very  singular  version  of  the  origin  of  the  persecu- 
tion under  Tiberius,  but,  in  the  main,  even  supported. 
According  to  him  its  direct  cause  was  an  act  of  fraud 
committed  by  a  Jewish  conversionist  who  was  a  fugitive 
from  Judean  justice,  and  his  three  accomplices,  upon  a 
prominent  female  proselyte,  Fulvia,  the  wife  of  Saturninus. 
^^  We  see  that  even  Josephus  has  connected,  though 
indirectly,  the  persecution  of  the  Jews  v/ith  propagandist 
efforts  of  some  of  them.  Accordingly  we  may  suggest 
that  we  are  substantially  furnished  with  testimony  by  all 
the  four  above-named  writers,  that  the  progress  of  the 
Jewish  propaganda  in  Rome  must  under  Tiberius  have  been 
very  strong  and  alarming,  so  that  either  he  himself,  or  his 
privy-councillor,  perhaps  in  conjunction  with  the  Senate, 
concluded  to  peremptorily  proceed  against  and  forcibly 
suppress  it.^* 

That  Jewish  proselytism  had  not  lessened,  but  rather 
increased  under  the  emperors  Caligula  and  Claudius,  in 
whose  reigns  the  Jewish  prince  Agrippa  enjoyed  such  vast 
privileges,  succeeding  at  last  to  become  king  of  the  Jews, 
in  which  exalted  position  he  wielded  a  very  potent  influence 
under  which  the  Jewish  cause  could  not  but  have  thriven 
freely  and  auspiciously,  is  provable  from  various  sources. 
Not  only  does  it  result  from  Seneca's  stricture  quoted 
above,  and  which  belongs  to  this  and  perhaps  partly  to 
Nero's  period,  but  it  is  also  demonstrable  from  the  Satire 
of  his  younger  contemporary,  Persius  —  like  him  by-the-by 
a  Stoic,  having  had  Cornutus  as  teacher.  Persius,  criticising 
in  his  fifth  Satire  some  varieties  of  moral  slavery,  which  he 
declares  as  worse  than  bodily  servitude,  holds  out  to 
censure  also  those  in  the  bonds    of    superstition,    as    one 


58  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

example  of  which  he  designates  the  observance  of  Jewish 
hoh'days.  which  he  must  have  noticed  or  at  least  known  to 
exist,  among  Judaizing  Romans.  He  says:  "And  when 
Herod's  days  ^^  have  come,  and  lamps  holding  violets 
which  are  placed  at  the  greasy  window,  discharge  a  heavy 
fume,  and  the  tail  of  the  tunny-fish  swims  round  in  a  red 
platter,  and  the  white  bowl  swells  ( is  filled )  with  wine: 
thou  movest  the  lips  silently,  and  fearest  the  circumcised 
Sabbaths"  (  vv.  179-84).  This  shows  incontestably  that 
towards  the  middle  of  the  first  century  C.  E.,  the  age  of 
this  satirist,  the  Jewish  religion  had  made  remarkable 
headway  in  Rome,  and  its  rites  were  embraced  by  a  number 
of  those  Roman  people,  who  were  no  more  satisfied  by  the 
rotary  mechanism  and  spiritless  forms  of  the  State  religion. 
Jewish  propagandism  could  then  flourish  and  extend  in 
Rome  the  more,  because  Tiberius'  edicts  of  repression  had 
been  revoked  by  Caligula  (Dion  Cass.  Ix.  6,  in  Renan, 
'Apostles'). 

As  to  the  much-mooted  expulsion  of  the  Jews  from 
Rome  by  Claudius,  this  circumstance  seems  not  to  have 
materially  interrupted,  for  any  considerable  length  of  time 
at  least,  the  energical  progress  of  the  Jewish  propaganda, 
since  it  is  an  historical  fact,  conceded,  too,  by  almost  every 
modern  author  who  wrote  on  this  subject,  that  it  thrived 
in  his  reign  all  over  the  Roman  world.  Suetonius'  report 
(Claudius,  §  25  ;  cp.  Acts  xviii.  2),  "  The  Jews  making 
constant  tumults  under  an  instigator,  Chrestus,  he  expelled 
from  Rome."  is  contradicted  by  Dion  Cassius,  who  records 
of  Claudius  that  he,  "  finding  the  Jews  again  overweaning, 
did,  as  they  could  not  be  banished  from  the  city  without 
tumult  by  their  multitude,  not  drive  them  out,  but  forbade 
them,  follov/ing  their  parental  mode  of  life,  to  hold 
meetings."  ^'^  While  the  edict  surely  appears  even  in 
Dion's  version  hard  and  oppressive  enough,  it  yet  does  not 
seem  to  have  prevailed  long,  nor  markedly  checked  the 
propagandist  influence  and  agitations  of  Jews  in  Rome. 
For  we   have    the   above-cited    testimony  of  Seneca  for  its 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  59 

continuance  which,  while  the  exact  date  of  its  composition 
is  not  known,  can  yet  safely  be  taken  as  referring  to  the 
state  of  things  obtaining  at  and  extending  through  the 
reigns  of  both  Claudius  and  Nero. 

Under  the  latter  emperor  the  spread  of  Judaism  in  Rome 
was  doubtless  considerable,  having  also  had,  as  may  properly 
be  surmised,  a  powerful  champion  in  the  person  of  the 
empress  Poppaea,  who  is  by  Josephus  characterized  as 
God-fearing  —  a  title  often  used  for  Judaizing  converts 
from  paganism.  That  she  was  a  devotee  of  Judaism  is 
very  probable,  from  her  solicitous  intercession  with  the 
emperor  in  behalf  of  Jewish  petitioners  against  the 
determination  of  both  the  king  and  the  procurator  of  Judea, 
in  a  matter  concerning  the  reverence  for  the  temple  of 
Jerusalem  (Ant.  xx.  8,  1 1  ;  see  also  Winston's  note  ib.,  and 
Schuerer,  1.  c). 

That  with  the  downfall  of  the  Jewish  State  this  propa- 

.gandism  did  not  abate,  but  perhaps  rather  increase,  maybe 

inferred    from    the    invidious    paragraphs    of  Juvenal  and 

Tacitus,  and   in  particular  from  Dion   Cassius'  account   of 

Domitian's  furious  proceedings  against  Judaizers. 

Captive  Judea,  though  held  down  by  the  iron  grasp  of 
the  Roman  power,  and  smarting  under  the  contumely 
poured  out  upon  her  by  the  heartless  victors,  had  yet  in  her 
widowhood  —  mainly,  we  hold,  by  the  eternal  verity  and 
unvarying  vigor  of  her  principles  of  belief — continued  to 
make  many  spiritual  captives  from  among  the  heathen. 
Jerusalem  was  destroyed,  the  Jewish  State  dissolved,  but 
Judaism  itself  remained  a  conquering  force.  Its  professors 
were  politically  cowed  and  socially  scorned,  yet  this  misery 
had  not  impaired  the  spiritual  essence  of  Judaism  itself 
It  remained  intact,  and  proved  itself  powerful  and  trium- 
phant in  continuing  to  win  converts  to  itself.  As  captives 
even,  the  Jews  carried  with  them  into  strange  lands  the 
boon  which  attracted  the  favorable  attention  and  desire  of 
a  number  of  pagans. 

(5) 


60  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Domitian,  though  he  had  worked  with  all  his  might  to 
stamp  deeper  and  deeper  on  the  name  of  the  Jews  the 
odium  of  their  expatriation,  by  severely  and  occasionally 
ferociously  exacting  the  Jewish  fisc  so-called — that  most 
repulsive  tax  imposed  by  Vespasian  in  place  of  the  annual 
sacred  gift  of  the  Shekel,  as  a  tribute  to  the  Capitoline 
Jupiter  —  could  not  hinder  the  vast  expansion  of  Jewish 
belief  and  rites  in  the  realm,  and  specially  in  Rome.  His 
own  cousin  Flavius  Clemens  who  was  invested  with  the 
consulship,  and  his  wife  Flavia  Domitilla,  his  own  niece, 
were  adherents  of  that  Judaism  which  he  so  utterly  detested. 
For  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  the  progression  of  Juda- 
ism in  Rome,  proselytes  to  this  faith  were  stigmatized  with 
the  title  and  charged  with  the  crime  of  atheism,  now  that 
he  had  sworn  bitter  vengeance  on  it.  Those  high  person- 
ages were  judicially  accused  and  condemned  of  that  crime. 
Both  had  to  pay  a  dire  penalty.  Clemens  was  sentenced 
to  death,  and  his  wife  Domitilla  banished  to  an  island.^ ^ 
The  same  charge  of  atheism  was  brought  against  "  many 
others"  (see  Dion  Cassius  )  who  had  adopted  or,  as  this 
writer  is  pleased  to  render  it,  "  lapsed  into  Jewish  customs." 
Their  punishment  was  either  death  or  confiscation  of 
property. 

The  same  writer's  testimony  opens  to  us  a  most  unam- 
biguous and  clear  view  of  the  propagation  of  Judaism  in 
heathen  countries,  as  late  even  as  the  latter  years  of  the 
first  century  C.  E.  For  those  vengeful  proceedings  of 
Domitian  were  enacted  in  the  last  year  of  his  reign.  And 
as  his  mild  successor,  Nerva,  had  decreed  that  no  one 
should  be  harassed  for  his  "  Jewish  mode  of  life  "  (Dion 
Ixviii.),  it  is  justly  to  be  supposed  that  conversions  to  it 
became  again  as  frequent  under  him  as  they  were  under 
Domitian. 

To  sum  up,  it  cannot  be  questioned  that  these  cases, 
occurring  in  the  very  heart  of  the  empire  and  witnessed  by 
many  bigoted  puritans,  also  by  the  contemporary  literators 
Juvenal  and  Tacitus,  will  have  aroused  their  jealous  ire 
and  intense  contempt  toward  the  pertinacious  Jewish 
nation. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  6l 

Think  of  the  spleeny  satirist  Juvenal  and  his  younger 
compatriot  Tacitus,  the  praetor,  and  later,  under  Trajan, 
consul  and  afterwards  consular,  being  by  inevitable  fate 
compelled  to  witness  for  over  half  a  century  a  mighty, 
impulsive  Judaizing  activity  in  the  capital.  Imagine  them 
seeing  thousands  of  homeless  Jews,  reduced  to  slavery  or 
beggary,  in  Titus'  and  the  subsequent  reigns  ;  and  on  the 
other  side  noticing,  despite  the  crushing  scorn  fastened  on 
their  nation,  a  continuous  influence  on  pagans  of  their 
religious  precepts.  More  bitter  than  wormwood  it  must 
have  been  to  them,  particularly  to  Tacitus,  to  note  a  goodly 
number  of  their  countrymen  not  only  abjure  the  allegi- 
ance to  the  many  immortal  gods  and  tutelar  divinities  and 
"  contemn  "  them,  but  —  scandal  of  scandals  —  fly  to,  and 
own  and  worship  a  god  "  apprehended  merely  in  the  mind, 
and  as  an  only  one,  eternal,  inimitable  and  imperishable 
Being"  (see  Hist,  v.);  to  note  them,  moreover,  observe 
the  Jewish  Sabbaths,  holidays  and  fasts,  dietary ^^  and  mar- 
riage restraints,  and  specially  the  rite  of  circumcision  —  a 
rite  that  was,  judging  from  the  frequent  derisive  allusion  to 
it  by  many  Roman  writers  of  the  empire,  to  the  Roman 
mind  the  most  obnoxious  of  all,-^  but  to  which  so  many 
neophites  submitted  themselves  and  their  male  children 
with  pious  alacrity,  to  become  fully  incorporated  in  the 
community  of  Israel. ^^  Add  to  the  Judaizing  of  Roman 
converts  the  above-discussed  grievances  against  the  Jews 
of  their  diversity  of  worship,  their  separateness  and  dis- 
dainful treatment  of  polytheists,  supplemented  by  an  always 
ready  and  ample  proportion  of  Gentile  envy  against  them, 
as  also  by  tfae  intense  national  indignation  at  them  for  caus- 
ing to  the  Roman  power  such  an  excessive  strain  on  men 
and  resources  by  their  contests  and  wars  ;  and  then  judge 
whether  Roman  laureate  poets  or  other  literati  by  the  grace 
of  the  immortal  gods,  and  withal  high-flown  patricians  and 
dignitaries  of  the  city  could  not,  through  these  circumstances 
alone,  have  become  Jew-haters,  independently  of  any  for- 
eign influence,  especially  that  of  the  Alexandrian  literature, 
as  Dr.  Joel  has  so  emphatically  and  with  such  an  amount  of 
literary  diligence,  as  well  as  self-complacency,  asserted  ^ 


62  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

We  positively  protest  — and  believe  to  have  abundantly 
supported  this  our  position -- that  the  mischief  of  literary 
slander  and  aspersions  cast  by  Roman  scribes  on  Jews  and 
Judaism,  sprang  originally  from  those  fountains  flowing 
everywhere  in  the  pagan  world,  in  Rome  as  well  as  in 
Alexandria,  with  an  ever  fresh  current.  That  their  baleful 
veins  were  somehow  sympathetically  interconnected,  we 
are  ready  to  admit.  But  that  they  were  associated  through 
real  contact,  cannot  be  sustained  by  any  shadow  of  evidence. 

The  diversion  from  our  main  subject  which  we  allowed 
ourselves  in  the  foregoing  discussion,  to  refute  the  one- 
sided and  overdrawn  assertion  of  Dr.  Joel,  will  appear  of 
not  inconsiderable  moment  for  its  illustration  in  the  sequel. 
For  the  arguments  we  employed  to  show  the  various  causes 
of  pagan  hatred  and  contempt  for  Jews  as  being  every- 
where home-born,  enable  us  to  account  much  better  for  the 
false  and  derisive  representations  of  the  Jewish  religion  and 
its  usages  in  Roman  literature.  Consequently  we  will  also 
understand  better  the  various  opinions  expressed  in  it  on 
the  Sabbath. 

It  may  be  laid  down  as  an  axiom  that  it  was  just  the  con- 
tempt, in  which  Jews  and  Judaism  were  held  by  those 
literators,  and  the  malevolence  they  cherished  against  the 
Jewish  nation,  that  kept  them  in  almost  total  ignorance  of 
their  real  religious  conceptions  and  the  import  of  the  rites 
practised  among  them.  While  any  foreign  form  of  worship 
was  to  the  bigoted  Roman  a  superstition,  and  as  such  held 
in  light  esteem  or  thorougly  despised,  his  own  being  the  relig- 
ion proper,"^  and  for  this  reason  to  be  revered,  might  it  be 
ever  so  absurd,  the  Jewish  was  yet  more  offensive  to  him  for 
the  combined  causes  previously  mentioned.  Should  such  a 
conceited  bigot,  in  his  assumption  of  the  Roman  superiority 
above  all  the  rest  of  mankind,  take  the  pains  of  searching 
at  the  fountain-head  and  seeking  the  crystal  springs,  the 
concurrence  of  which  made  up  the  stream  of  Jewish  life? 
That  would  have  been  expecting  too  much.  A  superficial 
observation  of  any  Jewish  rite  practised  in  the 
capital,  was  to  him  sufficient  to  babble  about  it  in  his 
oeculiar,  contemptuous  strain.      His   words  or  works  were 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  63 

anyhow  not  intended  for  Gentiles  synnpathizing  with 
the  Jewish  nation,  but  for  those  either  indifferent 
to  or  possessed  of  ill-will  towards  it.  Why  then  should 
he,  in  speaking  of  points  of  the  Jewish  religion,  take  caution 
lest  he  might  pervert  the  truth  and  give  forth  misstate- 
ments? Reproach  for  any  distortion  of  facts,  not  to  say 
for  incorrect  statements  pertaining  to  Jewish  questions,  he 
had  surely  not  to  fear.  And  as  to  his  individual  conscience, 
this  suffered  no  touch  of  compunction  about  any  misrep- 
resentation of  the  Jews  and  their  religion.  It  was  over- 
ruled by  the  native  assumption  of  primacy  which  engrossed 
his  mind,  allowing  no  fair  judgment  and  justice  to  be 
awarded  to  any  institution  that  was  not  Roman,  and  was 
especially  blunted  with  regard  to  the  Jews,  by  the  force  of 
the  intense  contempt  he  nourished  against  them. 

When  we  observe  an  astounding  ignorance  betrayed  by 
Roman   writers  on  Jewish   subjects,  we    will,   moreover,  as 
regards  some  of  them,  be  at  a  loss  to  determine,  whether  it 
was  real  or  only  feigned.     Their  stable  antagonism  to  Jews 
would  not  permit  them  to  state  those  subjects  in  the  favor- 
able light,  in  which  they  may  have  appeared  to  themselves. 
They  found  it  much  easier  and   more  gratifying  to  make  a 
mockery  of  them   in  spite  of  their  own   better  knowledge. 
As  a  typical  ignorance  of  Roman  literators    about  Jewish 
religious  observances,  Juvenal's  designation  of  the  Mosaic 
code  as   a  "  secret  book"^^  may    be    cited.     Such,  indeed, 
it  was  and  remained  to  the  body  of  the  Romans.     Even  the 
authorities  were  utterly  ignorant  of  the  real  inwardness  and 
purport  of  the  Mosaic  institutions.     They  noted  the  Jewish 
law   as   so   peculiar   and   different  from   the   Roman.     Sus- 
picious   emperors    were    haunted    by    it    as    by    a    spectre, 
instilling  on  their  minds  the  fear,  that  it  might  be  a  code 
enjoining    an     irreconcilable    opposition    to    the    temporal 
power  of  Rome,  or   the   sovereign    impersonating  it.     We 
have    already    above    reflected    on    Caligula's     questioning 
of  the  Jewish  delegates  about  their  "constitution,"  that  is, 
as   we   explained   it,  the   Mosaic   Law,  with  regard   to   the 
worship  and    its   obligations  set   forth  therein.     He   could 
surely   have   informed    himself  about   the   principle  of  the 


64  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

immateriality  of  the  Deity  maintained  by  the  Jews,  from 
the  extant  Greek  version  of  the  Pentateuch.  But  he 
doubtless  scorned  the  idea  to  read  it  himself,  or  hav^e  it 
interpreted  by  unbiased  expositors. 

A  like  instance  of  an  imperial  investigation  of  the  statutes 
of  the  Jews,  is  reported  in  the  Rabbinical  literature.  It 
shows  strikingly,  how  little  acquaintance  with  them  the 
Roman  authorities  had  got.  If,  as  Graetz  (  Hist.  iv.  119) 
maintains,  it  belongs  to  the  period  of  Domitian's  reign, ^^ 
it  might  be  connected  with  the  o'pposition  the  Jews  mani- 
fested against  the  imposition  of  the  poll  tax.  They 
abhorred  it  so  deeply,  that  "some  either  concealed  their 
Jewish  mode  of  life  or  dissembled  their  Jewish  descent" 
(Suetonius,  '  Domitian,'  ch.  xii.),  rather  than  pay  a  tribute, 
by  which  their  hearts  were  revolted.  That  furious  despot 
may  have  construed  the  opposition  as  an  attempt  at 
rebellion,  and  consequently  desired  to  get  authoritative 
information,  whether  it  could  be  found  as  grounded  on  or 
referable  to  some  texts  of  the  Jewish  Scripture.  To 
obtain  it  he  may  have  sent  those  "two  military  ambassa- 
dors"^* to  the  Jewish  academy  and  Senate  of  Palestine, 
of  whom  an  account  is  given  in  Sifre,  Deut.  §  344;  the  Jerus. 
treatise  of  Baba  Kamma  f.  4  ;  and  the  Babylonian  treatise 
■of  the  same  denomination,  f.  38  (unlicensed  edition).  They 
may  have  been  commissioned  to  descry  that  portion  of  the 
Jewish  Mosaic-traditional  Law,  having  a  more  or  less  direct 
bearing  on  the  mutual  relations  of  Jews  and  Gentiles,  with 
the  chief  view  of  ascertaining  whether  any,  or  how  many 
of  its  precepts  indicated  or  implied  disloyalty  to  foreign 
rule  and  insubordination  to  other  laws,  which  were  in  this 
case  the  Roman. 

The  versions  of  the  three  just  named  Rabbinical  passages 
'have  indeed  in  their  present  transmitted  form  a  legendary 
aspect.  They  disagree  with  one  another,  too,  on  the 
subject-matter  proposed  at  that  imperial  inquiry.  In  both 
the  first  and  last-named  places  the  envoys  are  said  to  have 
taken  exception  but  to  one  Rabbinically  construed  ordin- 
nance  of  the  Pentateuch,  and  this  not  identical  in  both. 
The  Jerus.  Talmud  reports  two  such  instances  of  Mosaic- 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  6$ 

traditional  usage  (one  of  which  is  again  subdivided  in  two 
propositions),  touching  the  mutual  relations  of  Jews  and 
Romans.  But  in  the  main,  namely,  as  to  the  inquisition 
into  the  prevailing  principles  and  regulations  regarding 
the  responsible  interrelations  of  both  nations,  they  agree. 
And  this  justifies  our  assumption  that  there  is  a  real 
historical  background  to  that  differently  rendered  Rabbini- 
cal account  of  the  imperial  inquiry,  made,  once  upon  a 
time,  into  the  Jewish  Law. 

Whether  it  was  undertaken  for  merely  political  reasons, 
or  for  judicial  and  social  objects,  or  to  collect  a  general 
information  about  the  principles  of  faith,  practices  of 
religion  and  ethical  maxims  of  the  Jews,  is  immaterial  in 
the  question  now  before  us.  Thus  much  we  may  justly 
infer  from  that  account,  that  the  emperor  —  whoever  he 
was  —  had  with  his  entire  administration  kept  himself  till 
that  time  in  utter  ignorance  on  the  established  customs  of 
the  Jews.  Whether  it  was  essentially  lifted  by  that  official 
inquiry,  is  very  questionable,  indeed.  For  we  do  not  believe 
that  any  one  of  the  Roman  emperors  cared  much  about 
knowing  the  intrinsic  merits  of  those  Jewish  customs,  not 
bearing  in  some  way  on  the  problem  of  the  loyalty  of  the 
Jews  to  the  imperial  government.  The  result  of  the  inquiry 
by  the  ambassadors  will  then  have  had  very  little,  if  any, 
beneficial  result  for  the  Jews.  Their  religion  will  from 
thence  not  have  been  better  appreciated  by  the  Roman 
bigots,  than  it  was  before. 

They  will  have  continued  to  spurn  its  rites  as  "  absurd 
and  mean  "  (see  Tacitus,  Hist.  v.  5,  end),  and  persevered  in 
their  scornful  ignorance  of  them. 

That  Roman  military  and  judicial  functionaries,  admin- 
istering the  Jewish  affairs  in  Palestine,  were  during  the 
empire,  specially  from  the  second  century  C.  E.  on, 
somewhat  read  in  the  Jewish  Scriptures  —  some  of  them 
understanding,  perhaps,  the  Hebrew  language  —  as  can  be 
proved  from  many  passages  of  the  Rabbinical  literature, 
does  in  truth  not  conflict  with  our  opinion,  that  the  bigoted 
Roman  at  home  was  ignorant  on  Jewish  matters  from  his 
deep  contempt  for  the    Jewish   nation.       It  was,  we  hold, 


66  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

inevitable,  from  their  close  contact  and  administrative 
dealings  with  the  Jews.  Besides,  the  sense  of  expediency 
must  have  urged  that  some  of  those  officials  should  acquire 
a  better  knowledge  of  them,  than  their  cultured  or  learned 
countrymen  at  home.  It  was  their  station  that  unavoidably 
made  them  somewhat  familiar  with  the  institutions  of  the 
Jews,  so  many  questions  of  their  civil  law  and  religious 
custom  coming  under  their  cognizance.  That  therefore 
the  governor,  Tinnius  Rufus,  Quintus'  successor  in  Hadrian's 
reign,  and  a  few  more  civil  and  military  officers  of  the 
Roman  government  in  Palestine,  showed  themselves  fairly 
versed  in  Scripture,  does  not  signify  aught  against  our 
supposition.  And  while  we  admit  ourselves  that  the 
historical  inquirer  receives  from  several  indications  of 
literature  the  impression,  that  later  in  the  second  century, 
perhaps  already  during  or  after  Hadrian's  reign,  there  was 
an  endeavor  on  the  part  of  some  cultured  Romans  and 
pagans  in  general,  even  those  not  connected  with  the 
Roman  administration  in  Judea,  to  attain  some  better  and 
more  comprehensive  knowledge  of  the  contents  of  Hebrew 
literature,  we  presume  to  avouch,  on  the  other  hand,  that 
it  was  not  from  any  love  or  devotion  to  it,  or  the  motive  of 
being  able  to  appreciate  better  the  Jewish  character  and 
institutions,  but  mainly  to  qualify  themselves  for  keeping 
up  disputes  on  the  latter  with  those  aggressive  Jews, 
who  would  press  them  with  arguments  against  their 
polytheism.  By  being  Scripture-proof  themselves  they 
hoped  to  retaliate  on  them  with  the  weapons  of  criticism, 
and  bring  home  to  them,  if  possible,  the  weakness  of  their 
own  position.  This  can  be  gathered  in  particular,  as  far  as 
both  Jewish  and  Christian  polemics  are  concerned,  from 
the  notices  preserved  by  Origen  of  the  '  True  Account '  of 
Celsus,  on  which  we  cannot  here  enlarge. 

The  same  ignorance  that  prevailed  in  Rome  about  the 
Law  and  customs  of  the  Jews,  was  exhibited  by  its  men  of 
letters  about  their  object  of  Divine  worship.  From  Cicero 
to  Juvenal,  and  beyond  the  latter's  time  into  the  period  of 
Hadrian  and  the  Antonines,  we  meet  either  with  absurd 
misconceptions   or   coarse    taunts  of    the  Jewish    God    by 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  6/ 

many  cultured  Romans.  Cicero,  in  his  Oration  for  Flaccus, 
betrays  a  total  lack  of  knowledge  of  the  fixed  Jewish 
belief  of  the  divine  Unity.  For  he  exclaims  there  :  "How 
dear  it  (the  Jewish  nation)  was  to  the  immortal  gods,  is 
proved  by  its  having  been  defeated,  etc."  The  Roman 
pantheon,  much  as  his  own  philosophical  reasoning  has 
helped  shelling  it,  was  still  his  sublime  ideal.  About  the 
spiritual  Jehovah  of  the  Jews  he  had  not  learned,  or  he 
could  not  have  made  the  foregoing  exclamation. 

Juvenal  makes  of  the  Jews  "  adorers  of  clouds  and  the 
heaven  "2^  as  deities  (Sat.  xiv.  97;  cp.  "  summi  fida 
internuntia  coeli,"  ib.  vi.  545).  Tacitus  has  indeed  so  far 
done  justice  to  the  Jews,  that  he  stated  according  to  the 
truth  their  imageless  and  intellectual  worship  of  one  only 
divine  Being.  But  it  was  by  no  means  from  any  sense  of 
approbation  or  consent  that  he  made  this  statement,  but 
from  his  malignant  mind  and  with  scornful  criticism.  He  has 
moreover  tainted  that  true  account  by  countenancing,  at 
another  place,  the  story  of  an  ass's  image  being  worshiped 
in  the  Temple  (Hist.  v.  4),  and,  further,  by  relating  in  the 
name  of  some,  that  a  sort  of  service  of  Bacchus  was  carried 
on  there,  though  he  had  for  himself  to  find  it  incongruent 
with  the  known  Jewish  institutions. 

In  the  Talmud  we  meet  with  many  sacrilegious  diatribes 
uttered  by  Romans  of  official  rank  in  controversies  with 
Rabbis.  The  Romans  with  all  their  intellectual  refinement 
and  even  philosophical  training  could  not  disengage  their 
mind  from  the  attachment  to  their  gods,  nor  advance 
towards  the  Jews  with  a  tolerant  valuation  of  their  religious 
conceptions  and  practices.  Custom  had  identified  them 
with  the  national  polytheism,  which  they  recognized  and 
demanded  as  the  only  acceptable  form  of  worship  for  the 
various  nations  of  the  empire.  However  deeply  decaying  it 
was  in  the  capital,  it  nevertheless  predominated  outwardly^ 
and  outwardly  even  the  freethinkers  made  obeisance  to  it. 
Not  only  nature's  forces  were  vvorshiped  in  their  manifold 
personifications,  even  abstract  virtues  and  vices  had  their 
shrines.  Dead  parents  were  held  as  gods,  and  dead 
emperors  were  pre-eminently  awarded  divine  honor.    Even 


•68  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

a  number  of  living  emperors  claimed  divine  adoration  from 
the  people.  Fervid,  high-wrought  patriotism,  mingled  with 
a  slavish  adulation,  made  the  soldiers  worship  the  inanimate 
golden  eagles  in  front  of  the  legions  as  the  '  gods  of  war.' 

The  Jewish  decided  and  stern  opposition  to  every  form 
of  polytheism,  even  the  cultured  Roman  could  not  compre- 
hend.^*' He  was  neither  competent  nor  inclined  to  lift 
himself  in  his  thought  to  the  eminence  of  the  purely 
spiritual  apprehension  of  the  Divine  and,  while  he  would 
not  discard  allegiance  to  his  national  gods  for  himself,  to 
judge  fairly  of  those  among  whom  such  apprehension  was 
firmly  established.  If  nevertheless  true  enlightenment  as  to 
the  unity  of  God  is  known  to  have  existed  with  some  of  the 
Roman  people  at  certain  periods  of  their  historic  life,  it 
did  not,  we  believe,  flash  on  them  from  their  self-illumined 
spirit,  but  came  to  them  refracted  through  the  medium 
of  Jewish  missionaries  and  their  diligent  course  of 
propaganda. 

As  a  characteristic  specimen  of  the  stubbornness  with 
which  leading  Romans  defended,  on  the  one  hand,  the 
most  ridiculous  and  decrepit  religious  institutions  of  their 
own,  and  spurned,  on  the  other,  all  the  foreign,  branding 
them  with  the  stigma  of  superstition,  we  may  adduce 
Cicero's  denunciation,  in  the  above-discussed  Oration  for 
Flaccus.  of  the  Jewish  contribution  of  sacred  money  as  a 
^*  barbarous  superstitution."  When  we  bring  this  acrimoni- 
ous judgment  home  to  himself  and  his  vaunting  nation,  we 
will  meet  with  such  a  striking  contrast  in  favor  of  the  Jews, 
that  we  can  account  for  his  refusing  to  apply  the  same 
stigma  to  some  of  the  most  senseless  institutions  of  his 
own  country,  merely  by  his  immovable,  blind,  patriotic 
partiality. 

The  reader  is  without  doubt  in  general  familiar  with  the 
genuinely  Roman  organization  of  the  auguries.  They  were 
held  equal  in  importance  with  the  sacrificial  ritual.  The 
augurs  were  the  seers  or  prophets  of  Rome.  They  were  the 
interpreters  of  the  divine  will  and  dispositions  from  certain 
signs.  The  Roman  contrivances  of  divination  were  so 
essential  and  indispensable  in  the  opinion  of  even  the  most 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  69 

enlightened   citizens   that,   much   as   some   could   not   help 
mocking  at  them  as  fallacies,  or  designating  them  at  least 
as  "inventions  for  the  illiterate,"  or  to  "satisfy  the  errone- 
ous notion  of  the  multitude"  (Cicero,  De  Divin.  i.  ch.  47), 
there  were  again  others  who  put  forth  their  whole  armor 
of  logical  arguments  and  philosophy  to  defend  them  (ib.  ch. 
49).     Even   the  Stoics  of   Rome,  whose   tenet  of  Fate  or 
Necessity  should   of  itself  have  precluded  their  belief  in  or 
vindication  of  them,  were  obsequious  to  this  predominant 
and  deeply  rooted  organization,  arguing  in  its  favor  in  this 
wise  :     "  The    omens  from    cleft  livers,  or  peculiar   sounds 
of  birds  are  not  due  to  a  direct  interference  of  God.     But 
the  universe  had  from  the  beginning  been  so  constituted, 
that  certain  signs  have  to  precede  certain  events,  some  in 
entrails,  others  on  birds,  or  in  lightning,  portents,  constella- 
tions, the  vision  of  dreamers  or  the  speech  of  soothsayers" 
(ib.  ch.   52).     It    were    mainly  Epicurean  freethinkers  like 
Ennius,  who  were  outspoken  and  independent  enough    to 
freely  jeer  at  that  Roman   hocus-pocus  (ib.  ch.  58).      The 
elder   Cato,  too,  is    reported   to    have    declared — and   this 
sentence  had  made  such  a  mark  that  tradition  preserved  it 
for    coming    ages — that    "he    wondered   how  an    haruspex 
should     not     laugh     on    meeting    a    colleague."       Cicero 
agrees    with    this   sentiment    (De    Divin.  ii.  24;    De  Nat. 
Deor.  i.  26).     He,  further,  arraigns  the  Stoics  strongly    for 
their    inconsistency,    contending    that    according    to    their 
theory  that  nothing  occurs  by  chance  and  everything  that 
happens,  however  rarely,  has  its  appointed  natural  cause, 
there   could    not   possibly  be  any  validity  in  portents  (  De 
Divin.  ii.  28).   He  also  directly  assails  the  three  departments 
of    haruspicina,    v'z.,  divination     from    entrails    and    other 
marks  of  victims,  from  lightning,  and  from  various  prodigies 
(ib.  ii.  18  sq.).     His  standpoint  is,  that  there  is  actually  no 
divinity  in  divination,  that  is,  the  gods  are  not  connected 
with  anything  from  which  diviners  derive  their  predictions 
and  premonitions. 

And  yet  for  all  that  he  pleaded  earnestly  for  the  reten- 
tion of  the  institutions  of  divination,  and  the  obedience 
■due   to   the   auspices   revealed   by  the   national   college   of 


70  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

augurs.  To  run  counter  to  such  "religion"  and  obstinately- 
set  at  naught  this  "inherited  custom,"  was  to  him  most 
censurable  and  deserving  of  punishment  (ib.  ii.  33).  He 
holds  that,  although  the  organization  of  the  augurs  was 
originally  intended  only  to  serve  as  oracles,  it  was  yet  later 
preserved  and  retained  for  the  sake  of  the  commonwealth 
(ib.  35).  "The  custom,  ceremony,  discipline  and  law  of  the 
augurs  and  the  authority  of  their  college,"  he  puts  forth^ 
"  are  retained  alike  with  regard  to  the  opinion  of  the 
vulgar,  and  the  great  advantages  accruing  therefrom  to  the 
State"  (ib.  33). 

It  were,  as  we  see,  motives  of  statecraft  and  indulgence 
of  the  popular  belief,  that  prevailed  on  Cicero  to  stand  up 
for  a  'religion,'  which  he  had  otherwise  to  expose  as  so 
unreasonable.  He  could  not  get  it  over  his  egotistically 
patriotic  heart  to  dissuade  the  people  from  its  continuance, 
much  as  his  clear,  philosophical  mind  protested  against  it. 
Differently  he  thought,  however,  concerning  the  Jewish 
custom  in  question.  It  certainly  was  approvable  by  the 
most  caustic  logic.  Yet  to  tolerantly  acknowledge  it  as 
pious  and  proceeding  from  a  consciousness  of  nationality, 
which  he  himself  praised  as  the  worthiest  quality  as  far 
as  the  people  of  his  own  country  were  concerned,  he  had 
no  mind.  The  augurs'  observation  of  the  sacred  chickens 
kept  in  pens,  and  the  way  they  ate,  was  '  religion, '  strictly 
to  be  heeded.  But  the  religio-patriotic  gift  of  the  Jewish 
people  dispersed  from  the  centre  of  their  national  and 
publicly  religious  life,  he  must  stigmatize  with  the  contu- 
melious title  of  "  barbarous  superstition  !  " 

In  about  the  same  manner  has  Tacitus  pitifully  compro- 
mitted  himself  by  denouncing  what  was  to  him  Jewish 
superstition,  while  he  was  a  victim  to  real  superstition 
himself.  In  his  narration  of  the  prodigies  that  appeared, 
during  the  last  throes  of  the  Jewish  revolution,  in  70  C.  E.,. 
on  the  heavens  in  the  beleaguered  city  of  Jerusalem,  he 
taunts  the  Jews  as  a  "  nation  given  over  to  superstition,  but 
opposed  to  religions  (religious  rites),"  because  they  held  it 
wrong  to  avert  the  evil  of  which  they  were  forewarned  by 
those  portents,  either  with  sacrifices  or  vows. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  7 1 

Had  they  resorted  to  propitiating  the  divine  wrath 
manifested  by  those  signs,  by  victims,  animal  or  human  — 
for  the  latter  practice  was  yet  in  vogue  in  Nero's  time  and 
still  later  ;  see  Joel,  '  BHcke  etc'  ii.  p.  25  —  the  religious 
historian  would  apparently  have  been  satisfied.  But  since 
they  did  not  attempt  to  expiate  those  portents  (see  on  this 
point  also  Josephus,  Wars  vi.  5,  3,  4,  and  compare  2  Mace, 
v.  2-4),  and  would  most  unquestionably  have  with 
abhorrence  abstained  from  doing  so,  if  it  were  to  be 
attempted  by  a  human  sacrifice  (he  seemingly  wondered, 
too,  that  they  held  it  as  "  criminal  to  kill  any  of  the  agnates," 
Hist.  v.  4),  they  had  to  be  branded  as  a  superstitious 
nation  ! 

Again,  he  proved  himself  a  very  credulous  man  by  fairly 
believing  in  the  Chaldean  horoscopy.  Deploringl^  he 
relates  the  continuously  decaying  faith  in  this  art  of  the 
Chaldean  astrologers,  "of  which  the  past  as  well  as  the 
present  offered  such  illustrious  examples."  Even  the 
Chaldean  wisdom  he  could  value  —  for  its  pretended  benefit 
to  the  State  only,  it  is  true — ,  but  for  Jewish  wisdom,  the 
"beginning  of  which  is  the  fear  of  God,"  he  could  not 
conceive  the  slightest  regard.  Their  firm  and  unshaken 
religious  belief  was  decidedly  'superstition,'  whereas  he 
had  not  independence  of  spirit  enough  to  decide  for  himself, 
whether  the  Stoic  Fate  doctrine,  or  the  Epicurean  chance 
theory  commended  itself  for  acceptance  (Ann.  vi.  22). 


CHAPTER  IV. 

ROMAN   WRITERS   ON   THE    JEWISH   SABBATH. 

Can  we  in  view  of  the  indiscriminate  disregard  for  Jewish 
religious  institutions  with  which  we  meet  in  the  works  of 
the  literary  men  of  Rome,  expect  from  them  a  fair  valuation 
of  the  Sabbath  ?  Can  we  expect  that  those  denouncing  the 
Jewish  religion  as  superstition,  and  who  were  purposely  or 
carelessly  ignorant  about  it  in  its  various  precepts  from 
their  utter  contempt  for  its  professors,  should  speak 
reverently  and  appreciatingly  of  their  weekly  day  of  rest? 
Contemplative  rest,  sacred  meditations,  the  average  Roman 
knew  not.  To  have  a  halting  day  once  every  week  on 
which  man  should  pause,  collect  his  mind,  and  abstract  it 
from  the  turmoil  and  also  pleasures  of  common  life,  was  a 
perception  exceeding  his  horizon.  The  Roman  festivals 
were  mostly  gay  holidays  with  plenty  of  exciting  sensuous 
enjoyments.  When  he  therefore  saw  the  Jews  and  Judaizers 
observe  the  Sabbath  with  abstinence  from  labor  and  due 
sanctity,  his  pagan  spirit  must  have  been  roused  to 
disdainful  pity  for  the  former,  and  scornful  spite  against 
the  latter.  Many  a  one  will  have  vented  his  disgust  at  this 
observance  in  derisive  and  reviling  language.  Literators 
have  embodied  this  sentiment  in  their  writings,  as  we  will 
now  demonstrate. 

Before  we  review,  however,  the  opinions  on  the  Jewish 
Sabbath,  uttered  by  writers  from  the  Augustan  age  onward, 
we  have  to  premise  that  from  their  contemptuous  ignorance 
about  all  the  Jewish  solemn  days,  they  used  to  confound 
them  with  the  Sabbath,  or,  rather,  comprised  them  all,  even 
the  fast  days,  under  the  generic  name  'Sabbata. ' 

That  the  fasts  were  to  them  included  in  this  name,  can 
be  proved  from  the  following.  Suetonius  (Augustus,  y6) 
preserved  a  statement  of  Augustus,  made  in  a  letter  to 
Tiberius,  i:i  which  that  emperor  boasts,  as  one  more  proof 
of  his  moderate  living  and  continence,  "  not  even  a  Jew 
observes  the  fast  of  the  Sabbath  (he  employs  the  unusual 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  73 

singular  form,  Sabbas)  so  strictly  as  1  did  (fast)  to-day." 
He  doubtless  alluded  here  not  only  to  the  fast  of  the 
Atonement  day,  as  Joel  proposes  (1.  c.  p.  133),  but  to  other 
fasts  as  well.  The  same  import  has  Martial's  jejunia 
sabbatariarum,  or  sabbatariorum,  "  the  fasts  of  the  Sabba- 
tarians" (Epigrams  iv.  4).  In  this  epigram  he  depicts  the 
incomparably  unbearable  smell  of  a  certain  Bassa  in  the 
following  way.  Naming  a  number  of  very  bad  odors, 
among  them  the  "smell  of  the  fasts  of  the  Sabbatarians, "^ 
he  sarcastically  suggests  that  Bassa  had  better  smell  of  all 
those  intolerable  things,  than  to  smell  as  he  really  did. 
This  is  reducible  to  the  meaning,  "  of  all  these  things, 
Bassa,  I  would  rather  smell  than  smell  like  you;"  see  the 
translator  in  Bohn's  Library.  The  expression  Sabbatarians 
suggests  the  supposition,  that  he  thought  at  the  same  time 
of  Judaizing  converts  from  paganism,  who,  from  Josephus' 
notice  (Ag.  Ap.  ii.  40),  kept  the  fasts  like  the  born  Jews. 

We  construe  Juvenal's  peculiar  description  of  the  land 
of  Agrippa  and  Berenice  —  Judea  —  as  the  one,  Observant 
ubi  festa  mero  pede  sabbata  reges,  "  where  kings  observe 
the  solemn  Sabbaths  with  bare  feet"  (Sat.  vi.  159),  in  the 
same  sense  of  fasts  of  the  Jewish  people.  That  he  should 
have  had  in  mind  that  of  the  Atonement  day  only,  is  not 
likely.  ^^  He  can  fairly  be  supposed  to  have  known  of  the 
Jewish  custom  of  having  the  feet  bare  on  many  fasts.  The 
Roman  Jews  had  doubtless  observed  it  on  the  so-called 
public  fasts,  pre-eminently  the  Ninth  of  Ab,  and  also  the 
communal  fasts  for  rain,  provided  these  properly  Palestinian 
days  of  humiliation  were  kept  in  the  dispersion  as  welL 
There  is  from  their  partial  perpetuation  unto  our  own  day 
all  likelihood,  that  they  were  then  observed  also  in  Italy, 
and  that  out  of  reverential  accommodation  to  the  mother- 
country,  though  the  rainfalls  were  there  regular.  These 
fasts  for  rain  were  the  Mondays,  Thursdays  and  Mondays 
following  the  new  moon  of  Kislev,  on  which  public  gath- 
erings for  devotion  and  penitence  took  place,  if  the  '  former 
rain  '  had  not  fallen  till  then.  That  it  was  enjoined  to  be 
barefooted  on  the  second  trio  of  these  fast  days,  is  attested 
in  the  Mishnah.  B.  Taanith  f.  12. 


74  I'HE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

That  the  Thursday  fasts  of  this  description  were  not 
unknown  to  some  Roman  writers,  may  be  gathered  from 
Horace's  Satire,  ii.  3,  in  which  he  introduces  "Jove's  day" 
(Thursday)  as  the  one  on  which  this  god  "  appoints  fasts." 
It  is  the  opinion  of  several  commentators,  that  he  alluded 
here  to  a  Jewish  fast,  adopted  also  by  Judaizing  Romans. 
If  it  be  really  feasible  to  construe  Horace's  statement  in 
this  meaning,  we  will  suggest  that  he  either  knew  as  well 
of  the  existence  of  Monday  fasts,  but  singled  out  only  the 
Thursday  for  its  superior  consecration,  or  that,  in  his 
superficialit}'  as  to  Jewish  customs  and  indifference  to 
religion  in  general,  he  took  no  notice  of  the  established 
Tote  of  those  fasts,  but  mentioned  the  Jove's  day  fasts 
merely  at  random,  having  by  chance  heard  that  the  Jews 
and  Judaizers  observed  fasts  on  Thursday. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  and  whatever  allusion  Juvenal  may' 
have  made  in  the  above  passage  of  his  Satires,  this  much 
can  incontestably  be  maintained  from  other  sources,  that 
Roman  writers  mixed  up  the  Jewish  fasts  with  the  Sabbaths, 
giving  them  the  latter  designation. 

That  they  included  the  Jewish  festivals  in  the  name 
Sabbath  will,  after  the  foregoing  elucidation,  not  surprise 
us.  We  may  deduce  this,  moreover,  from  the  above-quoted 
paragraph  of  Persius  who,  alluding,  as  we  have  shown,  to 
all  Jewish  holidays,  comprises  them  under  the  general 
name  '  Herod's  days'  and  also  '  Sabbaths.' 

Even  new  moon's  day  is,  by  Horace  at  least,  denoted 
Sabbath,  as  will  appear  from  the  satire  on  which  we  will, 
for  several  important  reasons,  enlarge  in  the  following.  In 
the  ninth  of  his  first  book  of  Satires  the  phrase  "thirtieth 
Sabbath  "  occurs.  That  it  cannot  mean  any  other  solemn 
day  of  the  Jews  than  that  of  the  new  moon,  the  reader  will 
promptly  hold  evident  with  us.  This  satire  had  the  fate  of 
a  various  interpretation  in  several  points.  In  order  to  get 
familiar  with  the  treatment  of  religion  by  that  leading  poet 
of  the  Augustan  age,  we  will  reproduce  it  synoptically, 
offering  in  connection  our  own  exposition  of  its  chief 
contents. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  75 

Horace  was  once  molested  by  a  bore  (  not  a  Jew  from  the 
Roman  Ghetto,  as  Mommsen,  '  Provinces  of  the  Roman 
Empire,'  iii.  p.  250,  gives  it)  who  persisted  in  following  him 
beyond  the  Tiber —  where  the  "  poor  Trastevere,  the  Jew- 
ish quarter,  densely  populated  since  Augustus  "  (Gregoro- 
vius)  was  situated.  His  friend  Aristius  Fuscus  met  him  by 
chance.  He,  too,  knew  and  at  once  recognized  that 
obstrusive  fellow.  Horace  motioned  the  friend  to  manage 
to  rescue  him  from  his  clutches.  The  importuner  did, 
however,  not  take  the  hint.  Horace  got  exasperated,  and 
contrived  the  make-shift  of  getting  him  out  of  the  way  by 
suggesting  in  the  form  of  a  question,  that  the  friend  had  to 
communicate  some  secret  to  him.  By  this  means  he  surely 
expected  to  get  rid  of  him.  Fuscus,  most  likely  satisfied 
in  his  mind  that  Horace's  device  would  be  attended  with 
no  success,  attempted  to  employ  another  and,  as  he  thought, 
better  one.  He  said,  in  the  hearing  of  the  bore,  "  I 
remember  well  (about  what  matter  I  have  to  speak  to  you 
secretly);  but  I  will  tell  you  it  at  a  more  opportune  time 
(and  place)  ;  to-day  is  the  thirtieth  Sabbath  :  dost  thou 
wish  to  offer  an  affront  (for  this  affront  by-the-by  Horace 
puts  in  his  friend's  mouth  the  filthiest  word  of  the  Latin 
vocabulary)  to  the  curtailed  (circumcised)  Jews  .''" 

We  surmise  that  the  spot  where  they  had  met,  was  near 
a  synagogue  or,  perhaps,  on  the  porch  of  one,  in  which  the 
Jews,  it  having  been  Rosh  Chodesh,  were  assembled  or 
about  to  meet  for  worship.  To  his  friend's  objection 
Horace  replied  :  "  I  have  no  religion."  "  But  I  have,"  the 
friend  rejoined  ;  "  I  am  somewhat  weaker,  one  of  the  many. 
Excuse  me,  I  shall  speak  to  you  at  another  time."  The 
bore  then  saw  fit  to  take  his  retreat. 

Whether  the  affair  described  by  Horace  took  place  in 
reality,  or  is  a  mere  product  of  his  fancy,  thus  much  we 
gather  at  any  rate  from  this  satire,  that  he  was  not  only  a 
rude  scoffer  at  Jewish  religious  observances,  but  in  the 
main  an  unscrupulous  reviler  of  every  religious  sentiment 
of  believers.  Godless  Epicurean  as  he  was,  he  had  no 
reverence  for  things  holy,  and  made  no  conscience  of 
disturbing  other  people's  devotion.     While  in  the  case  in 

(6) 


76  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

point  it  were  Jews  whose  religious  sentiments  were  to  have 
been  spared,  he  would  surely,  from  the  language  he  used, 
not  have  paid  any  regard  to  those  of  other  devotees,  either. 
The  "fear  of  the  gods"  he  elsewhere  characterized  as  the 
bane  of  society  (ib.  ii.  3). 

We  contend,  further,  that  the  friend  who  avows  himself 
as  "one  of  the  many,"  was  by  no  means  a  Jew,  as  Jost, 
'History  of  Judaism,'  i.  330,  suggests,  nor  a  sort  of 
proselyte,  as  Schuerer  (Hist,  of  the  Jewish  People,  etc..  ii.) 
thinks.  There  is  positively,  we  maintain,  no  warrant 
whatever  for  either  construction  of  the  words  "  unus 
multorum."  All  that  is  implied  in  them  is,  that  the  friend 
confessed  himself  as  being  one  of  those  who  had  religion, 
or  at  least  veneration  of  the  Divine.  This  would  constrain 
him  in  his  conscience,  not  to  scandalize  the  Jews  or  any 
other  class  of  worshipers  at  their  place  of  devotional 
assembly,  by  standing  in  front  of  it  and  holding  an 
animated  or  demonstrative  conversation.  We  have  to  ask 
those  authors  inclined  to  make  of  Horace's  friend  a  Jew  or 
Judaizer,  Was  it  consistent  or  at  all  possible  that  the  poet 
should  have  imputed  to  his  friend  such  a  contemptuous 
allusion  to  the  Jews  as  we  note  in  the  above,  had  he  been 
one  of  them,  or  attached  to  them  by  religious  belief.-* 
Would  such  action  not  have  been  a  most  barbarous  outrage 
of  a  friend's  feelings,  of  which  no  sensible  person  ever 
makes  himself  guilty  ? 

On  Ovid's  mention  of  the  Sabbath  we  reflected  in  part 
already  above.  We  have  seen  that  he  called  it  "  the 
Sabbath  of  the  stranger."  That  he  designates  the  Jews  as 
strangers,  though  they  were  assuredly  not  treated  as  such 
by  the  emperor  Augustus  (see  Philo,  1.  c),  must  not  surprise 
us  from  the  pen  of  a  Roman  writer.  The  Roman  men  of 
letters  as  a  class  seem  to  have  had  a  settled  aversion  to  the 
Jews.  The  very  tolerant  regard  which  Augustus  had 
manifested  towards  the  Jews  as  to  the  observance  of  their 
Sabbath  (see  Philo  and  Josephus),  was  evidently  not  shared 
by  our  poet. 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  TJ 

In  fact,  it  seems,  he  treated  it  not  only  as  the  Sabbath  of 
the  stranger,  but  it  is  probable  that  his  knowledge  of 
Jewish  matters  and  customs  was  only  gathered  by  a 
superficial  hearsay,  and  was  withal  limited  to  the  rites 
of  circumcision  and  the  Sabbath,  which  formed  the  princi- 
pal, salient  points  of  demarcation  of  the  Tews  from  the 
Gentiles  in  the  eyes  of  the  Roman  public.  He  with  other 
earlier  and  later  writers  of  the  capital,  kept  himself  at  a 
haughty  distance  from  the  Jews,  and  remained  proudly 
ignorant  of  their  religious  institutions.  This  distance  we 
may  recognize  also  in  his  styling  them  once  the  "Jew(s)  of 
Syria "  (Art  of  Love,  1.  I.),  and  again,  later  in  the  same 
book,  the  "Syrians  of  Palestine,"  which  latter  denomination 
he  probably  derived  from  Herodotus  (comp.  Mommsen, 
'  Provinces  of  the  Roman  Empire,'  iii.  p.  244). 

As  to  Ovid's  notice  of  the  Sabbath,  it  occurs  yet,  beside 
the  passage  quoted  above,  in  two  places  of  the  just 
cited  'Art  of  Love.'  In  the  first  place  he  advises  the  young 
man  anxious  to  start  a  courtship,  to  betake  himself  to 
various  public  institutions  and  shrines,  among  them  the 
temple  of  Venus  and  Jewish  synagogues,  concerning  which 
latter  he  suggests  "nor  let  the  seventh  holy-day  observed 
by  the  Jew  of  Syria  escape  you." 

That  the  poet  should  here  have  had  before  his  mind  the 
attraction  of  "numbers  of  Roman  females  to  the  services 
held  in  the  synagogues  on  the  Sabbath,  probably  by  the 
music,"  as  Riley  (as  above)  remarks,  is  a  rather  far-fetched 
assumption.  The  Jewish  music  in  the  Roman  synagogues 
was  doubtless  of  a  very  primitive  character,  a  plain  chant, 
that  can  barely  be  thought  to  have  attracted  the  notice  and 
desire  of  attendance  of  any  outsider  but  him,  who  was 
otherwise  drawn  thither  by  a  sense  of  devotion  to  the  God 
of  Israel  worshiped  therein.  It  would,  on  the  contrary, 
appear  as  more  probable  that,  if  Gentile  Roman  ladies 
were  meant  by  the  poet,  he  thought  of  them  as  seeking 
the  Jewish  places  of  worship  with  the  sincere,  pious  purpose 
of  adoring  the  true  God  and  otherwise  entering  into 
religious  relations  with  the  Jews. 


78  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

But  this  interpretation  is  by  no  means  necessitated  by 
the  tenor  of  the  passajj^e  in  point.  We  have  to  declare  it 
quite  admissible,  that  he  referred  only  to  Jewish  ladies 
visitin^  their  own  places  of  worship  on  the  Sabbath,  from 
among  whom  he  advised  the  young  man  addressed  to 
choose  an  object  of  love. 

Later  in  the  same  book  he  proposes  to  him  not  to  fix 
upon  any  inopportune  or  unlucky  day  for  his  purpose,  to 
which  sort  of  days  he  does  yet  not  count,  as  he  expressly 
states,  the  fatal  memorial  day  of  A.llia  (see  above)  and 
"  the  day,  when  the  festival  occurs,  observed  each  seventh 
day  by  the  Syrian  of  Palestine,  [a  day]  not  suited  for  the 
transaction  of  business." 

Persius'  passing  on  the  celebration  of  the  Jewish  Sabbaths 
and  holidays  by  Judaizing  Romans  as  an  instance  of  that 
kind  of  slavery,  which  consisted  in  allowing  religious  fear 
to  sway  the  mind,  we  have  already  discussed  above. 

We  will  now  turn  to  his  older  contemporary,  Seneca. 
His  malicious  utterance  regarding  the  extensive  acceptance 
of  Jewish  laws  by  the  Roman  and  other  nations,  the  pith  of 
which  is  the  sentence,  that  they,  the  vanquished,  have 
given  laws  to  their  conquerors,  we  have  already  reviewed. 
Let  us  now  examine  what  he  says  on  the  Jewish  Sabbath. 
He  reproaches  the  Jews  that  "they  injure  themselves  by 
its  observance,  as  they  lose  by  it  almost  the  seventh  part 
of  their  lifetime,  passing  it  in  idleness"  (Augustine,  1.  c.).^^ 
That  proud  philosopher  of  the  Porch  who  professed  such 
sublime  doctrines  as  "  Virtue  is  shut  out  from  no  one,  it  is 
open  to  all  ;"  or,  "the  mind  makes  the  nobleman,  which 
enables  us  to  rise  from  the  basest  condition  above  fortune  ;" 
or,  "  All  men  have  the  same  beginning  and  the  same  origin. 
No  one  is  more  noble  than  another,  except  the  man  of  lofty 
genius,  with  talents  fitted  for  the  successful  pursuit  of  the 
higher  objects  of  life,"  had  yet  no  mind  to  apply  them  so 
universally  as  to  make  them  embrace  the  Jews  as  well.  No, 
these  were  a  "  most  criminal  nation," — an  incriminating 
denotation  which  we  meet  with  in  no  other  Roman  writer, 
not  even  the  malicious  Tacitus,  who  made  out  the 
Christians  only  as  "  hated  for  their  crimes." 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  79 

Seneca's  national  and  relit^ious  prejudice  against  the 
Jews  was  evidently  intensified  by  his  notice  of  the  rapid  and 
large  progress  that  their  religion  was  then  making  among 
the  Gentiles.  A  man  of  such  superior  intelligence,  and 
ethical  teacher  of  such  high  pretention  as  he  was,  should, 
we  verily  expect,  have  been  free  from  intolerance  of  every 
description.  We  should  think  to  find  him  a  foremost 
champion  of  religious  liberty  and  social  toleration.  Instead 
of  it  we  meet  him  in  the  van  of  base  and  coarse  haters  of  a 
people,  whose  national  crime  was  no  other  than  their 
tenacious  adhesion  to  their  ancestral  religion. 

The  Sabbath,  he  charges,  the  Jews  pass  in  idleness ! 
Bigot  as  he  was,  he  would  not  acknowledge  the  sacred  rest 
and  meditative  and  devotional  exercises  of  the  Jews  on  the 
Sabbath  as  meritorious,  and  at  least  equal  to  the  feasts 
of  ecstasy,  which  he  and  his  colleagues  would  indulge 
themselves  in  with  rapturous  delight  when  they  would 
pretend  to  have  arrived  at  solutions  of  hard  ethical 
problems,  that  had  for  a  long  time  engrossed  their  high 
mental  faculties  ! 

Nor  would  he  pause  to  reflect  on  the  circumstance,  that 
his  own  fast  and  fierce  fellow-citizens  lost  much  more  time, 
than  the  Jews,  in  the  celebration  of  their  many  public 
festivals.  "  The  seven  ordinary  Roman  festivals  of  the 
year  lasted  together" — towards  the  end  of  the  glorious 
Republic — "sixty-two  days,  aside  from  the  gladiatorial 
fights  and  other  numerous  occasional  sports  and  amuse- 
ments" (  Mommsen  1.  c.  iii.  p.  496).  Moreover,  what  a 
preponderantly  favorable  contrast  with  the  popular  festivals 
of  Rome  must  not  the  Jewish  Sabbath  have  offered  to  an 
unprejudiced  person,  in  its  great  conduciveness  to  the 
elevation  of  the  mind,  which  so  prominently  figured  as  the 
end  of  every  wise  man  in  the  Stoic  philosophy.  As  how 
much  preferable  must  not  have  appeared  to  such  a  person 
the  material  loss  of  one  day  out  of  seven,  when  it  was 
counterbalanced  by  the  remarkable  gain,  in  its  stead, 
of  refinement  of  thought  and  feeling,  to  the  spending 
of  series  of  days  in  idle  excitement  in  the  circuses,  where 
barbarous  spectacles  were   the   intellectual   food    on    which 


8o  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

the  Roman  vulgar  subsisted  ;  where  beasts  were  set  to 
fighting  not  only  with  one  another,  but  also  with  men,  and 
the  combats  of  gladiators  with  each  other  —  those  select 
performances  with  which  candidates  courting  the  suffrages 
of  the  crowd,  or  grands  ambitious  to  settle  themselves  in 
the  high  opinion  of  their  fellows  for  glory's  sake,  used  at 
times  to  treat  the  masses  —  formed  the  keenest  delight 
offered  to  the  populace  !  And,  further,  how  incomparably 
more  conducive  to  the  advancement  of  pure  morals  must 
not  to  such  a  person  have  appeared  the  reading  and  study 
of  the  Law,  replete  as  it  was  with  the  most  salutary  lessons 
for  a  pure  and  noble  life,  as  it  was  customary  with  the  Jews 
on  the  Sabbath,  than  the  meaningless  and  dry  heathen  rites 
performed  in  the  capital  of  the  world. 

Indeed,  had  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  with  their  many  rules 
of  purity  taken  hold  of  the  degenerating  people  of  Rome 
during  the  empire,  instead  of  the  attempt  of  the  Stoics 
to  reform  them,  the  chronicles  would  ha\'e  had  to  record  no 
such  stupendous  depravity  as  to  cases  of  adultery,  incest, 
paederasty,  patricide  and  infanticide.  But  no,  the  Jewish 
religion  and  its  sacred  literature  were  accorded  no  regard 
by  the  leading  and  learned  men  of  Rome.  They  were  too 
narrow  and  contracted  in  their  estimation  of  their  own 
country  institutions,  to  give  credit  to  those  of  the  Jews,  or 
encourage  a  broader  influence  of  their  sacred  literature. 

Juvenal  ^^  makes  the  same  reproach  of  idleness  as  to  the 
Sabbath  of  the  Jews  and  Judaizers.  In  the  above-quoted 
satire  in  which  he  dilates  on  the  evil  examples  given  by 
Roman  parents  to  their  children,  he  produces  as  one  of  them 
the  Jewish  mode  of  life,  which  the  sons  of  Judaizing  parents 
adopt  from  them.  "  But  the  father  is  in  fault,"  he  complains, 
"  with  whom  each  seventh  day  was  a  day  of  idleness,  and  did 
not  belong  to  any  part  of  active  life."  The  harsh  and 
contemptuous  verdict  of  idleness  by  which  both  he  and 
Seneca  condemn  the  Sabbath,  must  not  surprise  us, 
consideringthat  they  looked  at  it  through  the  darkened  glass 
of  national  prejudice  and  bigotry,  and,  in  particular,  that 
they  were  sorely  vexed  at  seeing  a  number  of  their  Gentile 
compatriots   find   spiritual  solace   in   the   reverence  for,  or 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  8 1 

*  fear  of  the  Sabbath.'  Their  contempt  for  the  Jews  being 
mingled  with  the  deep  indignation,  that  some  of  the  good 
Romans  had  so  glaringly  estranged  themselves  from  the 
custom  of  their  mother-country,  prompted  them  the  more 
vehemently  to  denounce  the  Sabbath  as  an  institution  and 
vehicle  for  fostering  idleness. 

That  Tacitus,  the  most  malignant  Roman  traducer  of  the 
Jews,  fell  in  with  those  two  literators  in  denouncing  the 
Sabbath  as  a  day  of  idleness,  we  must  not  find  strange.  He 
differs  from  them  only  in  being  more  explicit  on  the  origin 
of  the  Sabbath,  of  which  he  enumerates,  with  his  reputed 
historical  excellence,  several  accounts  gleaned  from  the 
armory  of  Grecian  Jew-haters,  such  as  Apion  and  the  like. 
The  theory  that  "the  seventh  day  was  fixed  for  rest,  because 
that  day  had  brought  them  the  termination  of  their  toils," 
seems  to  have  suited  him  best.  For  he  could  attach  to  it 
the  imputation  of  the  preference  of  the  Jews  for  idleness, 
which  he  indeed  brings  forward  in  the  connected  sentence  : 
*'  then,"  those  writers  say,  "  sloth  having  pleased  (the  Jews), 
the  seventh  year,  too,  was  given  over  to  idleness." 

We  have,  with  this  chronic,  bitter  Jew-hater's  opinion  on 
the  Jewish  Sabbath,  arrived  in  our  review  at  the  period  of 
Trajan.  The  violent  commotions  of  oriental  Jews  in  his  and 
Hadrian's  reign,  and  the  latter's  unexampled  furious 
prosecution  of  those  of  Judea,  were  surely  no  opportune 
occasions  for  dissolving  the  prejudice  against  the  Jews  in 
general,  and  rectifying  the  misconceptions  the  bigoted 
Romans  had  cherished  regarding  their  religious  institutions, 
among  them  the  Sabbath. 

Nor  were  perhaps  the  times  of  the  Antonines  much 
more  favorable  for  a  fairer  estimation  of  the  Sabbath 
by  them.  Uprisings  of  smaller  proportions  occurred  again 
in  Palestine  under  Antoninus  Pius  and  even  Severus,  and 
measures  had  to  be  taken  to  deal  with  them  (Mommsen^ 
'The  Provinces  of  the  Roman  Empire,'  ii.  p.  244).  Such 
insurrections  would  surely  not  permit  the  cultivation  of  a 
more  friendly  sentiment  towards  the  Jews  by  the  Roman 
people,  at  least  by  their  men  of  letters  or  of  prominent 
political  station.     The  emperor  Pius  showed  himself  indeed 


82  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

yielding  to  the  Jews,  in  that  he  repealed  for  them  Hadrian's 
interdict  of  circumcision.  Yet  for  all  that  we  do  not  believe 
that  the  spirit  of  national  prejudice  and  antipathy  will  have 
permitted  the  body  of  representative  Romans  to  abate 
their  contempt  for  Judaism.  With  regard  to  the  Sabbath, 
it  can  be  equally  supposed  that  they,  though  perhaps 
knowing  a  little  more  about  it  from  the  Hadrianic  period 
onwards  than  before,  did  not  treat  it  with  any  fairer 
measure  of  indulgence  than  they  had  formerly  done.  If 
they  have  not  further  derogated  it  as  a  day  of  idleness, 
they  will  doubtless  have  denounced  it  as  an  idle  supersti- 
tion. 

On  the  whole  we  maintain,  that  it  was  so  alien  to  their 
national  consciousness,  as  well  as  to  their  religious  dispo- 
sitions and  habits,  that  its  appreciation  was  ordinarily  not 
to  be  expected.  Of  its  repeated  proscription,  too,  under 
Marcus  Aurelius  and  Verus,  mention  was  made  in  the 
earlier  part  of  this  work. 

As  a  representative  heathen  sentiment  on  the  Sabbath 
about  Hadrian's  period  (and  thereafter),  we  will,  before  we 
close  this  chapter,  adduce  that  of  Tinnius  Rufus,  the 
governor  of  Judea  in  his  reign.  This  personage  is  in  the 
Rabbinical  literature  frequently  credited  to  have  been 
engaged  in  colloquies  with  Rabbi  Akiba.  He  is  reported 
to  have  once  questioned  this  sage  :  "  What  can  be  the 
preference  of  one  day  before  others,  that  the  Sabbath  was 
for  your  people  singled  out  of  the  rest  of  the  week  days  ?" 
The  striking  reply  of  the  Rabbi  was  :  "  And  what  distin- 
guishes one  man  from  others  ;  I  mean,  why  was  Tinnius 
Rufus  himself  chosen  from  the  rest  of  the  Romans  for  the 
high  post  he  presently  holds  ?  "  The  governor  retorted  : 
"  For  what  other  reason  than  because  the  emperor  deemed 
it  right  to  intrust  me  with  it  ?"  "  In  the  same  way,"  Akiba 
declared,  "  the  Sabbath  has  been  selected  from  the  other 
days.  God  wished  to  honor  it  "  (Rabb.  Gen.  ch.  xi).  The 
foregoing  objection  against  the  Sabbath  is  so  likely  to  have 
been  made  by  a  genuine  Roman,  that  the  authenticity  of 
the  Midrashic  narrative  connecting  Rufus'  name  with  said 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY, 


83 


colloquy,  cannot  well  be  questioned.  For  with  the  Romans 
the  distinction  of  one  day  from  the  others  of  the  week  for 
objects  of  Divine  worship  and  sanctification,  was.  at  best  a 
superstitious  abnormity. 


NOTES. 


^  Zunz.  in  his  "Gottesd.  Vortraege,"  quotes  Josephus, 
Against  Apion  ii.  i8,  and  Acts  xv.  21,  in  which  passages  the 
custom  of  reading  the  Law  in  public  every  Sabbath,  is 
mentioned  as  very  old. 

2  If  Plutarch  had  taken  pains  to  acquaint  himself  with  a 
larger  volume  of  Jewish  historical  facts,  than  he  really  did, 
he  might  have  hit  upon  one  instance  at  least,  entirely  similar 
to  those  cases  of  the  Greek  mythology  enumerated  before 
in  the  chapter  of  his  book  in  point,  and  which  he  declared 
as  so  commendable,  because  they  offer  an  example  of 
prompt  resoluteness  to  fight  with  material  weapons,  com- 
bined with  prayerful  reliance  on  divine  aid.  About  the 
same  thing  Jonathan,  the  Asmonean  leader,  exhorted  his 
brave  warriors  to  do,  when  they  were  surprised  by 
Bacchides'  forces  in  the  valley  of  the  Jordan  on  the 
Sabbath,  which  day  he  had  slyly  chosen  to  make  havoc 
among  the  Jewish  army.  Jonathan  summoned  his  men  "to 
arise  and  battle  for  their  lives,"  though  it  was  the  Sabbath, 
for  there  was  no  escape,  the  waters  of  the  Jordan  cutting 
off  the  possibility  of  retreat.  At  the  same  time  he  urged 
them  to  "  call  unto  God,  that  they  might  be  saved  oat 
of  the  hands  of  the  enemies."  There  was  surely  no 
"cowardice"  in  those  Jews  ;  their  unbending  religious  faith 
was  blended  with  an  equally  unbending  heroism.  And 
yet  they  were  slow  in  resolving  to  make  battle  on  the 
Sabbath  even  in  the  utmost  extremity  to  which  they  were 
reduced,  fearing  God  more  than  the  destruction  of  their 
lives  !     (  See  i.  Mace.  ix.  43  sq.). 

^That  the  zealots  had  in  the  fight  against  Cestius  not 
regarded  the  Sabbath,  as  Josephus  states  reproachfully 
(Wars  ii.  19,  2),  cannot  well  be  held  out  as  an  instance  of  a 
diminution  of  that  anxiety  in  the  minds  of  the  Jewish 
people.  For  not  only  were  the  zealots  only  a  faction  or 
factions  out  of  the  whole  Jewish  population,  the  great 
majority  of  whom  were  moderate  and  yet  peacefully 
inclined  at  that  point  of  time  ;  but  we  have  also  to 
consider  that  those  enthusiastic  revolutionists  could,  in 
their  fiery  impulse  to  avenge  the  unheard-of  outrages 
committed    on    their     nation     by     Florus     and     previous 


86  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

procurators,  and  to  defend  and  free  it  from  the  oppressive 
crushing  dominion  of  the  Romans,  not  be  expected  to  sit 
down  passively  and  ponder  scrupulously  over  the  possibility 
of  breaking-  the  Sabbath,  by  setting  out  to  meet  the 
approaching  army  of  Cestius.  They  could  not  afford,  we 
suppose,  to  wait  till  this  commander  would  make  the  first 
attack,  losing  perhaps  meanwhile,  during  the  Sabbath  rest, 
the  best  advantages  over  him.  There  was  in  those  days 
of  fearful  pressure  and  successive  miseries  too  much  at 
stake  for  their  country  to  be  determined  by  the  nice 
distinction  between  offensive  and  defensive  warfare,  which 
at  any  other  time  themselves  doubtless  recognized  as  well 
As  to  Josephus'  animadversion,  ib.  17,  10,  we  suggest,  that 
the  same  reply  holds  good  which  we  objected  to  the 
previous  one,  only  that  we  know  of  no  mitigating  explana- 
tion of  the  act  itself  reported  there. 

I  may  mention  here  yet  in  passing  that  Graetz,  History 
of  the  Jews,  iii.  545,  has  rendered  the  passage  of  Josephus  ib. 
ii.  19,2,  in  which  he  observes  that  the  Sabbath  is  with  them 
kept  the  most  holy,  incorrectly.  He  lets  him  convey  the 
notion,  that  the  zealots  were  observing  the  Sabbath  most 
of  all.  But  we  have  to  object,  that  Josephus  did  there  not 
specially  refer  to  the  zealots,  but  stated  merely  a  practice 
of  the  Jews  in  general.  Nor  does  he  discriminate  in  that 
place  as  to  classes  keeping  the  Sabbath  more  or  less  holy, 
so  that  his  words  might  be  construed  to  indicate  "  most 
of  all."  These  two  words  do  not  occur  in  his  statement 
at  all.  He  solely  wished  to  put  down  the  Sabbath,  in 
contradistinction  to  other  holy  days  or  religious  rites,  as 
being  most  strictly  observed  by  the  Jews. 

On  the  tenability  of  his  other  opinion,  that  the  Sham- 
maites  were  political  sympathizers  of  the  zealots,  the 
Hillelites  favoring  peace  and  discouraging  a  revolt  from  the 
Romans,  we  will  here  not  pass.  The  reader  is  referred  to 
what  Jost,  Hist,  of  Judaism,  i.  327.  Note,  observes  on  this 
theory.  Only  this  much  we  will  object,  as  pertinent  to  our 
present  subject,  that  to  discover  political  zealotism  in  the 
mere  theoretical  exposition,  credited  to  Shammai  (not  the 
Shammaites!)  in  B.  Sabb.  f.  19,  of  the  two  words  "ad 
ridtah  "  in  Deut.  xx.  20,  where  directions  are  given  for  any 
future  war  of  conquest  (see  Sifre,  Deut.  §203),  is  altogether 
too  conjectural.  Moreover,  Sliammai's  authorship  of  that 
exegetical  proposition  is  by  no  means  authenticated,  the 
Tosifta  Erubin,  iii.  7,  reporting  it  in  the  name  of  Hillel. 
Who  is,  in  our  day,  competent  to  decide,  that  the  version 
in  the  Babylonian  Talmud  is  more  accurate  than  that 
of  the  Tosifta  ? 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY,  8y 

*Comp.  Ant.  xix.  6,  3,  where  the  insolent  mob  of  Doris 
is  reported  to  have,  under  Claudius,  forced  this  emperor's 
statue  in  the  synagogue  of  that  city,  in  spite  of  an  imperial 
edict  previously  published,  that  guaranteed  to  the  Jews 
undisturbed,  religious  liberty. 

^This  suspicion  was  doubtless  based  on  his  knowledge 
of  what  happened  under  his  predecessor,  Tiberius,  that  the 
Jews,  namely,  offered  desperate  resistance  to  Pilate's 
attempt  of  placing  shields  dedicated  to  the  emperor 
(Josephus,  Ant.  xviii.  3,  i,  has  "ensigns  with  the  effigies 
of  Tiberius"  instead)  within  the  city  of  Jerusalem  (Leg. 
§38-39)-  Philo  seems  to  have  alluded  to  this  occurrence, 
together  with  the  profanation  of  the  Alexandrian  syna- 
gogues under  Flaccus'  administration,  when  he  advances 
with  respect  to  the  order  of  Caius  to  erect  his  statue  in  the 
Temple  :  *'  For  you  (Caius)  seem  not  to  have  attempted 
the  innovation  with  the  Temple  through  ignorance  of  what 
was  likely  to  result  from  it"  ( ib.  §31).  Helicon  of  whom 
we  treat  in  our  text,  and  other  persons  of  his  household, 
the  greater  portion  of  whom  were  Egyptians,  have 
undoubtedly,  on  their  part,  not  failed  to  foster  that 
suspicion. 

''That  the  desecration  of  the  Alexandrian  synagogues 
was  the  immediate  and  decisive  cause  of  the  mission  ot  the 
Jewish  deputation  to  Rome,  appears  not  only  from  the 
passage  in  Leg.  §  29  quoted  in  our  text,  but,  further,  from 
the  colloquy  they  held  among  themselves  before  they  were 
summoned  to  a  second  audience  with  the  emperor,  upon 
receiving  from  a  co-religionist  the  startling  news,  that  the 
Temple  of  Jerusalem  was  destroyed  (that  is,  as  good  as 
destroyed,  because  supposed  to  have  been  defiled  by 
idols),  the  emperor  having  given  the  order  of  erecting  a 
statue  of  himself  in  the  holy  of  holies  :  "And  will  it  be 
allowed  to  us  *  ''•'  to  open  our  mouth  about  the  syna- 
gogue before  this  destroyer  of  the  most  holy  place  .'' "  (Leg. 
1.  c.)  That  the  Jewish  disfranchisement  during  the 
administration  of  Flaccus  and  his  successor,  and  the 
atrocious  treatment  from  the  populace,  formed  part  of  their 
complaint,  is  certainly  not  to  be  questioned.  This  is 
evident  enough  from  Philo's  statement,  that  the  Memorial 
with  which  the  envoys  provided  and,  perhaps,  wished  to 
introduce  themselves  to  the  emperor,  contained  "a  sum- 
mary of  what  we  had  suffered,  and  of  the  way  in  which  we 
considered  that  we  deserved  to  be  treated"  (ib.  §  28) ;  as 
also  from  his  later  reflection  (ib.  §  29)  upon  "  both  the 
objects  on  account  of  which  we  were  sent."  Their  complaint 
was   about  their   religious  and  bodily  persecutions,  as  well 


83  'J'HE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY, 

as  about  the  insolent  encroachment  on  their  charters 
of  civil  equality.  Both  objects  were  combined.  Yet,  we 
hold,  predominant  and  directly  urging  to  the  voyage  to 
Rome  was  not  their  political  suffering,  but  the  unendurable 
affront  of  the  dedication  of  the  synagogue  to  Caius,  the 
deified  emperor. 

We  consequently  do  not  agree  with  Graetz,  otherwise  so 
highly  deserving  of  the  elucidation  of  those  gloomy  events 
in  the  history  of  the  Alexandrian  Jews,  who  (  History  iii. 
553)  insists  that  their  "disputed  equal  rights  were  the 
(sole)  cause  of  the  Jewish  embassy."  He  wishes  to  prove 
it  mainly  from  Ant.  xix.  5,  2.  But  the  edict  of  Claudius 
presented  there,  has  by  no  means  an  exclusive  political 
bearing  ;  it  guarantees  to  the  Jews  religious  liberty,  as  well 
as  it  re-secures  their  established  rights  and  privileges.  Nor 
can  we  for  one  moment  entertain  the  supposition,  that  the 
"sedition"  set  forth  there  as  having  arisen  between  the 
Jews  and  the  Greeks  of  Alexandria,  was  on  account 
of  political  rights.  The  Alexandrian  populace  could  not 
withhold  these  from  the  Jews  This  only  the  Roman 
government  might  violently  do,  directly  or  through  the 
lord-governors.  Why  then  should  they  fly  to  arms  and 
fight  with  the  Alexandrians  to  recover  what  these  could 
neither  bestow  nor  deny,  their  civil  rights  ;  specially  now, 
after  the  death  of  their  most  cruel  oppressor,  Caius,  when 
it  was  surely  more  practicable  to  seek  redress  for  present 
political  disabilities  at  the  seat  of  the  central  power,  Rome  ? 
But  when  we  attribute  that  armed  uprising  of  the  Jews  to 
continuous  religious  insults  and  affronts,  which  we  know 
them  to  have  endured  up  to  that  time,  and  also  to  all  kinds 
of  social  chicanery  to  which  they  were  daily  exposed,  we 
have  found  a  much  more  reasonable  motive  for  it.  The 
unspeakable  suffering  as  to  their  religious  conscience  and 
personal  security,  that  seemed  to  them  never  to  cease,  at 
last  incited  them  to  armed  resentment,  for  which  they 
doubtless  chose  the  absence  of  the  resident  governor,  so 
that  they  had  not  to  fear  a  forcible  suppression  of  their 
attempt  from  this  side. 

As  to  the  word  "  politeia "  used  by  Philo,  and  which 
Graetz  construes  in  a  political  sense,  we  contend  that  it  has 
in  the  relative  passages  no  such  meaning  at  all.  He  meant 
by  it  the  national  religious  constitution  or  law  of  Israel,  as 
contained  in  the  Mosaic  code.  In  this  sense  it  is  incontro- 
vertibly  employed  by  him  in  'On  the  Migration  of 
Abraham,'  ch.  xvi.,  where  he  propounds,  "A  good  name  falls 
to  the  lot  of  nearly  all  who,  rejoicing  in  contentment,  do 
not  overthrow  any  one  Of  the  existing  laws  (he  has  here  in 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  89 

mind  such  laws  as  the  Sabbath,  the  festivals,  circumcision, 
of  which  he  speaks  in  the  immediate  sequel),  but  observe 
the  ancestral  (or  national)  constitution  —  ten  patrion 
politeian  —  not  without  thoughtfulness."  Comp.  also  the 
"  God-loving  constitution,"  that  is,  the  Mosaic  Law,  in  *  On 
Monarchy'  ch.  vii.  The  same  signification  it  has  without 
doubt  in  the  sentence  (Leg.  §  44),  "  *  *  when  we  were 
sent  for  (by  the  emperor  to  an  audience  with  him,  not, 
'when  we  were  delegated'  by  our  Jewish  community)  to 
enter  upon  the  contest  concerning  the  politeia."  And  the 
same  religious  bearing,  we  hold,  the  term  has  in  Caius' 
question  to  the  delegates  (ib.  §  45)  :  "  I  wish  to  know  what 
legal  principles  you  practically  entertain  as  to  the  politeia  .'* " 

He  was  evidently  curious  to  hear  an  authoritative 
interpretation  of  the  principles  of  the  national  law,  which 
the  Jews  urged  so  persistently  in  their  opposition  to  offer 
worship  to  his  godship,  to  ascertain  whether  it  really 
conflicted  organically  with  such  compliance,  or  was  only 
put  forward  as  pretext  and  disguise  of  their  inward 
disaffection  and  disobedience  to  him. 

^Hausrath,  'New  Testament  Times',  in  Joel, '  Blicke,  etc' 
ii.  p.  118,  says  :  "Apion  made  his  Jewish  historical  studies 
and  investigations  in  the  taverns  of  Alexandria,  and 
reproduced  the  material  gathered  there  with  the  most 
decided  talent  for  everything  filthy." 

^Molo  was  by  far  not  so  malicious  against  Jews  as  Apion  ; 
see  josephus,  Ag.  Apion  ii.  15. 

^Whether  Cicero  succeeded  in  convincing  the  judges, 
that  the  Jews  were  real  enemies  of  Rome,  we  do  not  know. 
The  charge  he  advanced  could  certainly  not  apply  to  the 
remoter  past.  It  is  attested  by  authentic  history  that  the 
Jews  were,  in  the  times  previous  to  Pompey's  invasion  of 
the  Jewish  land,  not  averse  to  the  Roman  protectorate. 
From  the  first  half  of  the  second  century  B.  C,  the  Jewish 
rulers  were  anxiously  seeking  friendly  alliances  with  Rome. 
Judas  Maccabeus  made  a  league  of  friendship  and  assist- 
ance with  the  Senate,  which  was  afterward  renewed  by  his 
brothers  Jonathan  and  Simon  during  their  respective 
administrations,  and  again  by  the  latter's  son,  the  high- 
priest  and  sovereign,  John  Hyrcanus.  Nor  was  surely  the 
appeal  of  John's  grandsons,  Aristobulus  and  Hyrcanus  H., 
who  contended  with  each  other  for  the  title  to  the  govern- 
ment, to  Pompey  for  an  authoritative  decision  of  their 
claims,  a  sign  of  disregard  for  Rome  or  disdain  of  her 
glory.  It  must  on  the  contrary  appear  to  every  one  as  a 
mark  of  open,  respectful  acknowledgment  of  her  great 
power  and  prestige. 


90  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Aristobulus,  it  is  true,  was  repugnant  to  Pompey's 
authority  (Ant.  xiv.  3,  3  sq.),  and  his  men  obdurately 
refused  to  peaceably  surrender  Jerusalem  with  its  fortifica- 
tions to  him,  according  to  the  agreement  made  before 
between  both  (ib.  4,  i),  a  refusal  that  brought  on  the  forcible 
attack  and  ultimate  capture  of  Jerusalem  by  the  Roman 
army. 

But  unbiased  judges  could  scarcely  detect  any  sudden 
national  hostility  to  Rome  in  the  determined  endeavor  of 
Aristobulus'  military  to  fight  off  a  power,  attempting  to 
usurp  the  possession  of  the  capital  of  the  Jewish  nation,  to 
which  it  had  no  claim  whatever,  save  the  flimsy  one  derived 
from  the  league  obtaining  between  the  two  nations,  and 
which  they  could  not  allow  to  interfere  in  disfavor  of  him 
whom  they  held  their  rightful  sovereign.  Even  if  the 
refusal  of  Aristobulus'  men  had  to  impress  itself  on  the 
minds  of  Roman  authorities  as  a  direct  affront  offered  to 
them,  this  could  not  with  any  shadow  of  right  and  consist- 
ency be  made  a  charge  of  against  the  entire  Jewish  nation. 
For  the  multitude  of  the  Jews  were,  at  least  since  Alexander 
Janneus,  avowed  votaries  of  Phariseism  (Ant.  xiii.  10,  6), 
and  on  this  account  decided  opponents  of  the  Sadducean 
claimant,  Aristobulus.  Adhering  to  Hyrcanus  (ib.  xiv.  2, 
i),  from  sectarian  motives  at  least,  they  quietly  submitted 
to  Roman  interference,  although  they  practically  dis- 
countenanced, on  the  other  hand,  as  we  may  state  here 
additionally,  the  assumption  of  king'y  rule  by  either  of  the 
contending  rivals  (ib.  3,  2).  They  could  consequently  not 
as  a  body  be  adjudged  enemies  of  Rome. 

That  the  resistance  to  Pompey's  forces  had  indeed  not 
permanently  been  construed  as  an  aversion  from  the 
Roman  supremacy,  is  clear  from  Augustus'  official  testi- 
mony, that  "  the  nation  of  the  Jews  have  been  found 
grateful  to  the  Roman  people  ^  -  ""  in  times  past  also, 
and  chiefly  Hyrcanus  the  high-priest,  under  my  father  (.-'), 
C.-Esar  the  emperor"  (ib.  xvi.  6,  2).  The  interval  between 
this  epoch  and  the  time  of  Cicero's  delivery  of  the  oration 
in  question,  was  only  about  twelve  years.  Blind  prejudice 
alone  could  then  have  maintained  that  the  whole  Jewish 
nation  was  hostile  to  Rome.  P"or  indeed  those  who  were 
grateful  to  Rome  a  short  time  afterwards,  could  not  have 
been  permeated  by  a  spirit  of  enmity  towards  it  on  that 
day  when  Cicero  put  forth  his  argument  in  his  speech. 

Let  us  observe  yet  that  to  conclude  from  the  apocryphal 
'Psalms  of  Solomon,' as  Hausrath  did,  that  the  sting  of  the 
wound  which  Pompey  had  inflicted  on  the  Jewish  people, 
was    never    afterwards    removed,    is    too    hazardous.      The 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  9I 

interval  between  Pompey's  invasion  and  the  incorporation 
of  Judea  as  a  Roman  province  under  Augustus  in  6  or  7 
C.  E.,  or  rather  the  time  of  the  census  and  taxation,  was 
indeed,  on  the  whole,  agreeable  between  the  two  nations, 
as  is  evident  from  the  foregoing. 

^'^  For  a  good  Roman  to  embrace  such  a  superstition  was 
at  times  held  really  criminal.  Tacitus  reports  of  Xero's 
reign,  that  the  adherence  of  one's  wife  to  a  "foreign 
superstition"  was  then  adjudged  a  cause  for  divorce  (Ann. 
xiii.  31). 

^^  See  Suetonius,  'Augustus,' on  this  emperor's  abstaining 
from  visiting  the  sanctuary  of  Apis,  while  traveling  through 
Egypt. 

^^Renan,  'Apostles,'  remarks:  '"It  was  only  due  to  the 
tolerant  spirit  of  Augustus  himself,  that  no  repressive 
measures  were  enacted  against  Judaism  and  other  foreign 
cults"  (from  Dio  Cass.  li.  36). 

^^Graetz'  conjecture  in  his  'Proselytes  in  the  Roman 
Empire,'  that  allusion  is  here  made  to  the  conversion  of 
Flavins  Clemens,  is  too  visionary  to  deserve  any  earnest 
notice. 

^*  Such  measures  had  already  been  employed  in  the  best 
days  of  the  Republic.  There  is  a  notice  of  Valerius 
Maximus  preserved  (quoted  by  Schuerer,  '  The  Jewish 
People,  etc.')  which  reads  :  "The  same  (the  praetor  Hispalus) 
compelled  the  Jews  who  had  attempted  to  infect  the  Roman 
customs  with  the  cult  of  Jupiter  Sabazus,  to  return  to  their 
homes"  (own  country).  This  was  about  B.  C.  139.  There 
can  be  no  doubt  that  some  Jews  had  then  made  zealous 
efforts  to  win  Roman  polytheists  over  to  their  faith.  Who 
those  proselytizers  were,  whether,  as  Schuerer  suggests,  the 
envoys  of  Simon,  the  Asmonean  prince,  sent  to  Rome  to 
renew  the  former  mutual  league  (see  i  Mace.  xiv.  24  ;  xv. 
15-24) — and  this  is  by  no  means  unlikely,  considering  that 
in  the  Asmonean  family,  at  least  in  the  branch  starting 
from  Simon,  proselytism  was  a  conspicuous,  vehement 
trait  ;  see  on  John  Hyrcanus,  Ant.  xiii.  9,  i  ;  on  his  son 
Aristobulus  L  ib.  ii,  3  ;  and  on  his  other  son,  Alexander 
Janneus,  ib.  xv.  4, — or  some  other  Jewish  enthusiasts 
making  it  their  mission  to  acquire  proselytes  out  of 
paganism,  is  by  far  not  so  important  to  submit  to  inquiry, 
as  is  their  numerical  proportion  to  the  generality  of  the 
Jewish  residents  of  Rome.  We  hold,  against  Schuerer, 
who  would  deduce  from  said  notice,  that  "  no  Jews  dwelt 
permanently  in  Rome  about  B.  C.  139,"  that  there  was 
indeed  a  previously  established  Jewish  settlement  there,  the 
Jewish  population  comprising  more  than  just  those  banished 

(7) 


92  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

thence  in  that  year.  That  notice,  we  contend,  does  not 
warrant  the  assumption,  that  everyone  of  the  then  Roman 
Jews  was  engaged  in  proselytism,  so  that  the  order  must 
have  affected  each  and  all  of  them.  There  was  beyond  doubt 
a  considerable  number  of  them  in  the  city,  who  were  not 
eager  at  all  to  meddle  with  the  religion  of  the  pagan  inhabi- 
tants, being  perfectly  satisfied  to  follow  their  several  pursuits 
and  ply  their  trades  inoffensively.  We  presume  that  such 
Jews  were  not  included  in  the  order,  and  remained  unmo- 
lested in  the  city  thej^  had  chosen  for  their  habitation. 

The  same  view  we  apply  to  the  state  of  Jewish  propa- 
gandism  under  Tiberius.  That  it  was  in  his  reign  carried  on 
rather  zealously,  we  admit.  There  may  have  been  more 
missionaries  in  Rome  at  that  time  than  merely  those  four 
described  by  Josephus,  and  to  whom  he  imputes  the  origin  of 
Tiberius'  proscription  of  the  Roman  Jews.  But,  on  the  other 
hand,  we  cannot  reconcile  in  our  mind  the  assumption  that 
more  than  a  limited  number  out  of  the  whole  Jewish  popu- 
lation were  engaged  in  proselytism.  The  Jewish  people 
were  neither  then,  nor  at  any  other  period,  a  nation  of 
proselytizers.  Kuenen's  judgment  is  doubtless  correct,  that 
"the  conversions  were  rather  the  result  of  the  zeal  ot  a  few, 
than  of  general  measures  concerted  in  Judea  "  (Religion  of 
Israel,  iii.  274.) 

We  hold  it  important  to  emphasize  once  more  our 
opinion  of  an  established  settlement  of  Jews  having  existed 
already  in  the  year  B.  C.  139  in  Rome,  in  order  to 
controvert  the  common  notion,  (Hausrath,  N.  T.  Times,  i. 
\']'j,  entertains  it,  too)  that  the  Roman  Jews  occurring  in 
the  extra-Jewish  literature  of  the  empire,  were  none  other 
than  descendants  of  slaves.  This  notion  is  mainly  founded 
on  Philo's  statement,  that  the  Jews  of  Rome  in  Augustus' 
time  were  "mostly  Roman  citizens,  having  been  emanci- 
pated, etc."  (Leg.  §  24.)  We  have  to  charge  Philo  with 
being  indeed  accountable  for  that  notion.  He  conveys  in 
truth  the  idea,  that  there  were  at  the  beginning  of  the 
empire  no  other  Jews  in  Rome,  than  freedmen  and  a  residue 
of  those  still  bound  in  slavery.  But  such  assumption  is 
not  only  unreasonable,  but  is,  as  we  will  prove,  refuted 
from  Cicero's  Oration  for  Flaccus. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  whatever,  that  the  agreeable  and 
friendly  relations  which  had  obtained  between  the  two 
nations  since  the  early  Asmonean  period  (see  above  Note  9), 
drew  many  Jews  towards  Rome.  They  cannot  but  have 
met  with  a  hospitable  spirit  at  the  hands  of  their  new 
allies,  and  felt  themselves  at  home  and  secure  under  the 
potent   aegis    of   the    all-ruling    Rome.     They    immigrated 


THE  SA15HATII  IN  HISTORY.  93 

thither  of  their  own  free  accord,  as  free  men,  and  enjoyed 
the  liberties  and  privileges  of  citizens.  The  before-noted 
incident  of  the  year  139  had  not,  as  already  suggested 
above,  affected  the  entire  Jewish  settlement  of  Rome,  nor 
was  perhaps  the  proscription  enforced  for  any  length  of 
time.  New  accessions  steadily  increased  the  original  stock 
till,  when  masses  of  their  unfortunate  brethren  were 
carried  as  prisoners  of  war  from  the  east  and  sold  as  slaves 
about  the  middle  of  the  first  century  B.  C,  these  found  in 
them  a  respectable,  compact  community  of  free  and, 
therefore,  very  helpful  citizens. 

We  further  object  against  the  theory  that  the  Roman 
Jews  of  the  empire  descended  from  manumitted  slaves  only, 
that  Cicero,  in  the  named  Oration,  presumably  held  B.  C. 
59,  refers  to  the  Jewish  people  as  ".very  numerous,"  and 
having  great  "  weight  in  popular  assemblies."  Is  it,  we 
ask,  thinkable  that  he  could  allude  to  them  as  of  such 
quality,  had  they  been  no  more  than  emancipated  slaves, 
with  a  residence  in  the  capital  of  only  four  years'  duration  ? 
For  such  a  short  time  only  had  then  elapsed  since  Pompey's 
conquest  of  Jerusalem.  Moreover,  we  have  to  ask,  what 
authority  is  there  for  the  supposition  that  Pompey  carried 
masses  away  as  captives  from  Judea  ?  Josephus  at  least 
makes  no  mention  of  it.  The  captivity  of  the  Jews  and 
their  slavery  in  Rome  are,  in  our  view,  authenticated  only 
for  B.  C.  53-52,  in  which  time  fell  the  conquest  of  Crassus, 
when  "  about  30,000  of  them  were  carried  captives  (Ant. 
xiv.  7,  3).  This  we  assert,  though  we  are  aware  of  the 
apocryphal  book  of  the  Psalms  of  Solomon  presenting  in 
Ps.  ii.  6  sq.,  viii.  24  sq.,  and  xvii.  13,  a  numerous  captivity 
of  Jerusalem's  sons  and  daughters,  which  three  psalms  are 
by  Wellhausen,  'The  Pharisees  and  the  Sadducees,'  put 
down  as  alluding  to  Pompey's  invasion.  (See  also  Haus- 
rath,  N.  T.  Times,  ii.  183,  who,  moreover,  lets  the  whole 
work  be  composed  as  an  expression  of  indignation  over 
Pompey's  act  at  that  juncture). 

We  have  then  to  adjudge  Philo's  statement  in  question 
as  inaccurate,  in  so  far  as  he  mentions  no  other  Roman- 
Jews  as  citizens  than  those  coming  from  enslaved  captives. 
Admitting  that  the  number  of  these  was  larger  than  that 
of  the  ancient  Jewish  community  of  free  citizens  of  Rome, 
we  yet  uphold  emphatically  our  conviction,  that  the  latter 
existed  there  since  very  early  days,  and  formed  a 
respectable  and  influential  part  of  the  entire  Roman 
population,  to  whom  by-the-by  the  gibes  of  Roman 
satirists  would  most  illy  appl3\  A  Juvenal  and  Martial 
may  have  been  acquainted  only  with   that   class   of  Roman< 


94  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORV\ 

Jews  living  in  abject  poverty,  or  purposely  chosen  such  as 
specimens  for  their  depictions  of  Jewish  life  and  habits,  in 
about  the  same  way  as  modern  scribblers  in  preponderantly 
Christian  cities  are  wont  to  present  American  Judaism  as 
they  find  or  seek  it  out  in  the  squalid  quarters  of  wretched 
immigrants  from  half-civilized  European  countries. 

As  to  the  gibberish  'Jupiter  Sabazus'in  the  above  notice 
of  Valerius  Maximus,  we  will  yet  adduce  Schuerer's  sugges- 
tion ( 1.  c),  that  the  name  may  be  a  confusion  of  the 
Hebrew  Sabaoth  with  (Jupiter)  Sabazius,  a  Phrygian 
deity  ;  and  likewise  the  peculiar  interpretation  put  on  it 
by  Mommsen,  Roman  History,  ii.  p.  429,  who  relates  : 
"The  same  fate  (that  befel  the  Chaldean  astrologers)  was 
simultaneously  visited  on  the  Jews,  who  had  admitted 
Italian  proselytes  to  their  Sabbaths."  He  obviously  took 
Sabazus  in  the  sense  of  Sabbath. 

^^  Philo,  as  contemporary,  should,  as  we  would  presume 
at  first  view,  merit  the  credit  of  supplying  a  correct  report 
in  assigning  the  entire  persecution  to  Sejan,  and  not  to 
Tiberius.  That  this  emperor  was  no  decided  enemy  of  the 
Jews,  we  should,  farther,  in  the  premises,  conclude  from 
the  assurances,  mentioned  in  our  text,  which  he  gave  to 
the  Jews  of  the  various  provinces  through  their  governors. 
That  such  assurances  were  given,  must,  moreover,  appear 
as  certain,  because  Philo  who  reports  the  fact  could  have 
had  the  most  accurate  knowledge  of  it,  as  doubtless  a  com- 
munication in  behalf  of  the  Egyptian  Jews  had  also  come 
to  Alexandria,  his  heme.  Indirectly  it  might  also  be 
inferred  from  Tacitus  (  Hist.  v.  9,  and  Annals  ii.  42  ),  that 
Tiberius  was  not  unfavorably  disposed  to  the  Jews.  Yet 
since  the  other  three  writers  have  not  mentioned  Sejan  in 
connection  with  the  persecution  of  the  Jews,  Philo's  single 
attribution  of  it  to  that  powerful  intriguer  will  remain  sub- 
ject to  serious  doubt.  The  more  so,  when  we  hold  in  view 
Suetonius' characterization  of  Tiberius.  He  asserts  regard- 
ing the  popular  notion  that  Sejan  was  the  author  of  the 
cruel  acts  committed  in  his  reign,  that  in  reality  "  he  was 
not  so  much  set  up  by  Sejan,  as  that  this  councillor  only 
furnished  him  the  occasions  when  he  sought  them."  Philo 
may  then  have  labored  under  the  same  impression  with 
many  other  people  of  that  day,  judging  that  crafty  coun- 
cillor to  have  been  the  author  of  the  atrocities  which  in 
fact  Tiberius  perpetrated  of  his  own  cruel  mind. 

'^  Both  Josephus  and  Tacitus  agree  in  stating  that  4,000 
men  were  in  penalty  levied  out  of  the  Roman  Jews  and 
sent  to  the  island  of  Sardinia,  the  latter-named  author 
representing  them,  moreover,  as  young  men  of  the  families 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  95 

of  freedmen  who  were  assigned  for  the  penal  labor  of  put- 
ting down  the  robberies  on  the  island.     Suetonius,  too,  lets 
the  Jewish   youth  of  Rome   be  enlisted  and  distributed  in 
provinces  of  unhealthy  climates.     This  threefold  testimony 
would  at  once  give  the  lie  to  Tiberius'  assertion,  quoted  in 
our   text  from   Pliilo,  that  "the  punishment   was  not  exe- 
cuted upon  all,  but  only  on   the  guilty  ;  and  they  were  but 
few,"  were  it  not  for  the  reconciling  view,  that  such  enroll- 
ment in  the  army  was  in  the  eyes  of  that  cruel  emperor  no 
punishment    at    all.     This    view    could,    however,    scarcely 
hold    out  to  account  for  the  penalty  decreed,  according  to 
the  same    three   historians,    on   the  other  Jews.     Josephus 
presents  it  in   the  following  :      -     '^'     "  but  punished  (  with 
banishment  from  the  city,  as  the  context  shows  )  a  greater 
number  of  them  who  were  unwilling  to  become  soldiers  on 
account  of  keeping  the  laws  of  their  forefathers."     Sueto- 
nius gives  it  :   "The  rest  of  that  nation,  following  the  like 
persuasion,  he  removed   from   the  city  (that  is,  ordered  to 
leave  it )  on   pain  of  perpetual  servitude,  if  they  should  not 
obey  ( this  order  )."     Tacitus  advances  :  "  The  rest  should 
have  to  leave  Italy,  unless  they  would  before  a  certain  day 
have   renounced   their   profane  rites."     However  divergent 
these  three  accounts   are  from   one   another,  thej'  agree  at 
least  as  to  the  main  point  that,  after  the  forcible  enlistment 
of  the  younger  Jews  designated  for  Sardinia,  the  rest  of  the 
Roman   Jews  were   punished   also.     Whether  with  banish- 
ment from    the   city,  as  Josephus   and   Suetonius  have  it,  or 
with  compulsion  to  renounce  their  religion,  if  they  wished 
to  remain    in  Italy,  according   to  Tacitus,  there  can  be  no 
dispute  on    the  proposition   that   either  proscription  was  a 
real,  heavy  penalty.     Or  should  we   resort  to  the  extreme 
view  that  Tiberius  at  least  esteemed   no  penal   infliction  of 
any  sort  a  real  punishment,  as  long  as  the  head   remained 
on   the  trunk,  capital    penalty  alone  coming  to  him  under 
that  categorj',  in  order  to  square  his  reassuring  assertion  to 
the  Jews  through  the  governors,  with  the  opposite  reports  of 
those  three  historians  ?     We  have  not  the   mind  to  venture 
such  view,  although  we  would  gain   by  it  the  advantage  of 
accounting  for  that  assertion  in  this  manner,  that  the  "few 
guilty  "  ones  were   those  who   had    actually  to   suffer  with 
their  lives  for  the  accusation  laid  against  them. 

^'^  We  cannot  withhold  our  mistrust  of  Josephus'  account 
of  fraud  as  the  originating  cause  of  the  order  of  banishment 
of  the  Roman  Jews.  Not  only  have  the  three  other  writers 
not  mentioned  it,  but  it  appears,  moreover,  too  strange, 
not  to  say,  suspicious,  that  the  repression  decreed  alike  on 
the    Egyptian    and    Jewish   cults,   should    have   been    called 


-96  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

forth  almost  simultaneously  by  crimes  committed  at  about 
one  same  time  in  both  communitieti,  the  one  incest,  the 
other,  fraud  ( Ant.  1.  c.  4,  5  ).  It  is  our  opinion  that 
Josephus  got  his  information  on  the  subject  from  a  tainted, 
pagan  source,  and  one  partial  to  Tiberius  and  attempting 
to  free  him  from  the  odium  of  uncalled-for  religious  perse- 
cution. In  it  the  crimes  were  invented  for  this  purpose. 
Our  own  view  that  the  measure  was  concerted  from  an 
invidious  and  jealous  sentiment  towards  foreign  worships, 
believed  to  become  more  and  more  detrimental  to  the 
State  religion,  will  find  confirmation  in  the  fact,  that  Sue- 
tonius adds  yet  the  proscription  of  the  Chaldean  astrolo- 
gers, as  being  then  ordered  likewise.  For  it  would  be  prepos- 
terous to  suppose  that  this  proscription  was  also  caused  by 
a  particular  criminal  act.  We  have  at  least  no  intimation 
to  this  effect,  either  in  the  work  of  Suetonius  or  any  other 
Roman  writer.  From  all  indications  offered  us  by  that 
author,  we  cannot  assume  any  other  motive  to  have 
actuated  the  Roman  authorities  in  proceeding  against  the 
astrologers  than  the  same  puritan  one,  which  made  them 
proscribe  the  Jewish  and  Egyptian  worships.  In  their  case 
it  was  the  strong  apprehension  in  the  minds  of  the  authori- 
ties, that  the  national  institutions  of  divination  would  be 
seriously  impaired  by  being  longer  i2idulgent  towards  their 
art  and  practice. 

^^If  Tacitus  alone  were  to  be  consulted  as  to  the 
banishment  of  the  Jews  under  Tiberius,  it  would  appear 
to  us  as  more  plausible,  that  born  Jews  were  not  at  all 
affected  by  his  decree,  but  that  it  was  aimed  only  at 
freedmen  of  pagan  descent,  partially  converted  to  Judaism, 
and  belonging  to  the  class  of  the  God-fearing  or  half- 
proselytes.  It  is  true,  the  number  of  several  thousand 
Judaizing  freedmen  existing  in  Rome  at  one  time,  seems 
stupendously  large.  But  it  can  surely  not  be  pronounced 
impossible,  considering  the  zealous  propaganda  then  made 
by  Jews,  and  which  we  prefer  to  hold  as  having  been 
chiefly  active  among  people  of  lower  grade,  as  these  could 
much  more  easily  and  with  an  immeasurubly  better  prospect 
of  prompt  success  be  approached  by  the  missionaries  —  the 
Christian  missionaries  of  our  day  furnish  sufficient  illustra- 
tions of  the  truth  of  our  opinion — ,  than  the  high-born  and 
wealthy  persons  of  Roman  society. 

Freedmen  were  only  half  recognized  in  Roman  society. 
Their  position  was  a  middle  one  between  the  free  citizen 
and    the    slave.       It    could    then    not    have    been    such    an 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  97 

arduous  effort  to  turn  a  large  number  of  this  class  away 
from  the  polytheism  of  their  former  masters,  in  whose 
service  they  were  treated  so  cruelly  and  vilely,  and  gain 
them  for  the  Jewish  worship. 

Taking  those  freedmen  of  Tacitus  for  converts  from 
paganism  vve  can,  further,  much  better  and  readier  under- 
stand his  other  statement,  "the  rest  were  ordered  to  leave 
Italy,  unless  they  would  before  a  c^^rtain  day  have  cast 
off  their  unholy  rites."  Not  only  do  these  last  words 
convey,  in  our  view,  the  sense  of  adopted  in  contra- 
distinction to  hereditary  religious  rites,  as  likewise  the 
exoression  employed  in  the  same  context,  "  infected  by 
that  superstition,"  seems  unmistakably  to  point  here  as  in 
the  similar  decree  of  the  proscription  of  B.  C.  139  (see  above 
Note  14)  in  which  it  is  also  used,  to  a  propagandist 
introduction  of  Jevvish  rites  into  Rome  ;  but  we  would, 
if  born  Jews  were  to  be  understood  as  the  subjects  in  the 
passage  in  point,  be  at  a  loss  to  account  for  it.  how  a 
wholesale  coercion  of  them  to  forsake  their  own  national 
religion  within  a  certain,  short  period,  on  pain  of  total 
expulsion  from  entire  Italy,  could  have  been  decreed  by 
the  Roman  authorities.  The  Jews  of  Rome  were,  as  Philo 
reports,  mostly  citizens  and  as  such,  however  much 
prejudice  there  may  have  prevailed  against  them  in  that 
city,  they  were  legally  guarded  and  guaranteed  against 
any  infringement  of  their  religious  liberty.  An  order  of 
religious  ostracism  directed  against  any  class  of  real  Roman 
citizens,  seems  to  have  been  impossible,  as  it  would  posi- 
tively have  been  utterly  un-Roman.  Whereas  the  order  gains 
a  different  aspect,  when  we  take  the  freedmen  against  whom 
the  proceedings  of  proscription  were  enacted,  as  of  pagan 
extraction,  and  only  partially  converted  to  and  leaning  on 
Judaism.  They,  being  yet  in  a  state  of  semi-dependence, 
had  no  legal  right,  so  the  Senate  may  have  held,  to 
apostatize  from  the  national  religion  and  embrace  a  foreign. 
Or  the  Senate  would,  on  the  whole,  not  scruple  to  resort  to 
violent  measures  against  those  descended  from  slaves,  their 
lives  and  persons  being  otherwise  valued  rather  low  (cp. 
Tacitus'  "vile  damnum").  The  "rest"  of  the  freedmen 
who,  according  to  this  historian,  were  by  order  of  the 
Senate  threatened  with  expulsion  if  they  would  not 
abjure  their  religious  rites,  were,  we  further  intrepret 
agreeably  with  our  proposition,  those  half-converts  to 
Judaism  of  older  age  or  otherwise   unfit  for  military  service. 


98  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Lastly,  we  contend  that,  had  those  freedn:ien  of  Tacitus 
been  born  Jews,  they  would  we  firmly  believe  have  promptly 
allowed  themselves  to  be  expatriated,  rather  than  leave 
off  their  paternal  worship  or  religious  rites.  But  we  know 
them  to  have  existed  in  large  numbers  in  Rome,  when 
Philo  visited  there  in  the  reign  of  Tiberius'  successor, 
Caligula.  How  could  this  have  been,  were  we  to  maintain 
that  the  penal  proceedings  were  aimed  at  born  Jews  ?  They 
would  in  this  case  without  doubt  have  to  one  man  emigrated 
from  Rome,  so  that  Philo  could  not  possibly  have  found 
them  there  in  the  way  described  by  h  m. 

Graetz'  suggestion  that,  having  really  been  banished  by 
Tiberius,  they  were  recalled  by  him  twelve  years  after- 
wards (Hist.  iii.  261),  could  not  offer  us  any  acceptable 
egress  from  that  dilemma.  For  it  is  a  mere  conjecture, 
without  any  historical  warrant.  Jost,  Hist,  of  Judaism,  i. 
332,  too,  objects  that  it  is  insupportable. 

^^By  Herod's  days  he  meant  without  doubt  the  Sabbaths 
and  holidays  of  the  Jews.  In  the  same  significance 
"  sabbata,"  in  v.  184,  is  to  be  taken.  This  term  was  with 
the  Roman  writers  the  generic  appellation  for  all  Jewish 
solemn  days,  including  even  the  fasts. 

We  may  remark  here  that  Persius'  description  in  vv. 
180-81,  throws  a  desirable  light  on  the  estimation  of  the 
Jewish  custom  of  lighting  the  rooms  and  premises  on 
Sabbaths  and  holidays.  The  Talmud  represents  it  as 
a  means  of  cheerful  comfort,  appropriate  for  such  sacred 
days.  This  view  seems  to  us,  however,  a  late  interpreta- 
tion of  an  old,  firmly  established  usage,  reaching  perhaps 
back  to  obscure  antiquity.  Be  this  as  it  may,  we  can  at 
all  events  conclude  from  Persius'  illustration,  as  also  from 
Josephus  (Ag.  Ap.  ii.  40),  who  mentions  it  as  adopted  by 
Judaizing  Gentiles  apart  from  the  abstinence  from  labor  on 
the  Sabbath,  that  it  was  held  as  an  obligatory  observance 
of  essential  religious  importance. 

That  Persius  designates  the  Jewish  holidays  Herod's 
days,  may  be  explained  by  the  circumstance  th  it  Agrippa 
I.,  who  passed  under  the  name  of  Herod  (see  Acts  xii.),  was 
a  reputed,  high  Jewish  personage,  a  representative  Jew,  as 
the  phrase  runs  nowadays.  His  name  offered  itself  conse- 
quently very  availably  to  a  contemporary  Roman  writer, 
for  affixing  to  it  customs  descriptive  of  the  Jewish  people. 

^''The  inconsistency  of  Claudius'  persecution  of  the 
Roman  Jews  related  by  Suetonius,  with  his  published 
friendly  edicts  for  the  Jews  in  the  provinces  (see  Josephus, 
Ant.  xix.  5,  2,  3),  could  in  itself  not  make  us  discredit  that 
biographer's  account.     It  could  be  reconciled  this  way,  that 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  99 

the  emperor,  beinpf  truly  of  a  tolerant  spirit  to  the  Jews, 
was  3'et  provoked  by  some  dangerous  act  of  Roman  Jews 
to  such  a  degree,  that  he  could  not  well  help  resorting  to 
severe  measures  against  them,  which,  moreover,  were 
confined  to  the  capital. 

Again,  it  is  quite  possible  that  true  Jews  were  not 
affected  at  all  by  the  edict  of  expulsion.  Suetonius* 
attachment  of  "  impulsore  Chresto"  would  render  it  quite 
plausible  that  it  was  aimed  at  Christians  of  the  Jewish 
stock,  and  not  at  orthodox  Jews.  The  relative  statement 
in  Acts  xviii.  2,  may  mean  the  same  thing,  and  Aquila  and 
Priscilla,  too,  can  be  supposed  as  having  been  adherents  of 
the  Jewish  Christian  party  already  in  Rome.  (Comp.  Baur 
'  Paul,'  i.  328,  who  suggests  so  much  at  least,  with  reference 
to  that  relation  of  Acts,  that  "they  were  by  no  means 
entirely  unacquainted  with  the  Christian  faith  "  ).  It  is  well 
known  that  the  Christian  sect  was  in  those  days  yet 
counted  among  the  Jews.  The  ordinary  Roman  did  then 
not  distinguish  between  the  Jewish  believers  in  the  Messiah 
of  Nazareth,  and  the  bulk  of  the  Jews  denying  the  claim  of 
his  Messiahship.  The  imperial  order  of  which  Suetonius 
speaks,  may  accordingly  have  been  called  forth  by  those 
sectaries  only,  and  the  tumults  he  mentions  as  frequently 
made  by  them,  have  been  nothing  else  than  disputations 
they  engaged  in  with  orthodox  Jews  on  the  merits  of  the 
new  faith,  and  quarrels  resultirig  therefrom  ;  or  they  were, 
perhaps,  merely  the  self-conscious,  loud  and  open  proclama- 
tions by  those  sectaries  of  their  Messiah  and  of  his  eagerly 
awaited  second  coming,  which  had  to  impress  the  Roman 
authorities  as  being  plots  of  political  innovation,  that  were 
to  be  met  with  striking  measures  of  repression. 

Baur,  1.  c.  i.  327,  too,  interprets  the  "  impulsore  Chresto" 
as  meaning  nothing  else  than  Christianity  itself,  which  was 
then  becoming  known  in  Rome,  and  gave  occasion  to 
disturbances  and  disputes  within  the  Jewish  population. 
Only  that  he  declares  it  as  natural  that  the  two  contending 
parties,  the  Jews  and  the  Christians,  were  both  expelled 
from  the  city. 

While  our  construction  would  promptly  lift  the  inconsist- 
ency in  question,  we  yet  have  to  object  that  the  expression 
"  impulsore  Chresto"  does  not  without  violence  to  the 
letter  warrant  the  assumption,  that  the  author  meant  by  it 
a  movement  or  commotion  stirred  up  by  or  on  account  of 
Christian  sectaries,  but  rather  demands  our  supposing  one 
created  by  a  personal  Chrestus  or  temporal  Messianic 
kingly  pretender.  For  it  was  in  the  latter  capacity  only 
that    the    Roman     authorities    were    apprehensive    of   the 


lOO  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Christus's,  who  rose  among  the  Jews  from  time  to  time. 
This  appears  not  only  from  Pilate's  proceeding  against 
Jesus  (see  Matt,  xxvii.  ii,  Mark  xv.  2  and  in  especial  Luke 
xxiii.  2,  3),  but  also  from  the  fate  of  the  subsequent  Messiah- 
pretender,  Theudas,  who,  as  Josephus  reports  (Ant.  xx.  5. 
I  ;  comp.  the  respective  unhistorical  notice  in  Acts  v.  36), 
was  put  to  death  by  order  of  the  procurator  Fadus.  Later, 
under  the  procurators  Felix  and  Festus,  there  were  other 
Messianic  pretenders  likewise  punished  with  death  ;  see 
Ant.  XX.  8,  5.  6,  Wars  ii.  13,  5,  Acts  xxi.  38,  Ant.  xx.  8,  10. 

The  severity  with  which  tumultuous  concourses,  especially 
under  leaders,  were  viewed  and  visited  by  the  imperial 
Roman  authorities,  is  further  evidenced  by  the  violent 
interference  of  Pilate,  in  the  year  35  or  36,  against  the 
Samaritans  who,  incited  by  a  certairi  prophetical  leader 
and  Messiah  (see  Hausrath,  1.  c,  who  not  only  represents 
the  movement  as  a  Messianic  one,  undertaken  in  rivalry 
with  John's  JeivisJi  preaching  of  the  Kingdom,  but  expresses 
by-the-by  what  has  long  been  our  own  firmly  maintained 
opinion,  that  that  leader  was  none  other  than  the  notorious 
Simon  of  Gitto,  nicknamed  the  Magician,  of  Acts  viii.), 
marched  in  arms  to  the  Mount  Gerizim  to  recover  hidden 
sacred  vessels  (Ant.  xviii.  4,  i).  Pilate  at  once  construed 
this  as  an  attempt  at  revolt  (ib.  2),  and  made  bloody  havoc 
among  them. 

A  short  time  before,  John  the  Baptist  had  suffered  death 
at  the  hands  of  the  tetrarch  Herod  Antipas,  because  he  had 
feared  a  rebellion  from  him  and  the  crowds  that  had  joined 
him  (ib.  5,  2).  No  matter  how  spiritualistic  the  motives  of 
such  Messianic  illusionists  were,  the  Roman  officials  or 
creatures  of  the  Roman  power  and  favor  knew  of  no  pity 
towards  such  offenders.  (Let  usobserve  here  yet  in  passing 
that  Keim,  History  of  Jesus,  ii.,  insists  that  the  most  reason- 
able account  for  Antipas'  cruel  procedure  against  John  was 
his  political  apprehension,  just  as  Josephus  states  it.  Haus- 
rath, 1.  c.  p.  116,  coincides  with  him  in  preferring  Josephus' 
account  to  the  Gospel  explanations  of  it.) 

We  would  according  to  our  foregoing  suggestions  inter- 
pret Suetonius'  report,  that  the  expelled  Jews  were  the 
followers  of  a  Messianic  pretender,  who  acted  his  part  in 
Rome  in  an  aggressive  and  boisterous  way.  The  indulgence 
with  which  Claudius  treated  the  Jews,  owing  perhaps  to 
the  most  favorable  esteem  in  which  he  held  the  princes 
Agrippa  I.  and  his  brother  Herod  H.,  made  the  Jews  of  the 
empire  once  again  breathe  the  breath  of  ease  and  self- 
confidence.  Nay  they,  or  some  of  them  at  least,  may 
through  that  prestige  ha.ve  become  proudly  elated    or,  as 


THE  SABBATH  IN  llfTSDHV.  10 1 

Dion  gives  it,  been  "  again  overweaning."  The  hope  of  a 
speedy  release  from  the  Roman  supremacy  may  under  such 
circumstances  have  been  fondly  and  freely  cherished  by  a 
considerable  number  of  Jews.  This  temper  was  possibly 
improved  by  a  certain  pretender  who  set  up  for  the 
Messianic  deliverer,  preaching  in  the  synagogues  or  other 
gathering  places  of  the  Jews  his  tidings  of  the  mission  to 
recover  the  Jewish  independence.  That  person  may  even 
have  been  identical  with  the  Theudas  noted  above.  He 
may  have  come  to  Rome  also,  where  he  incited  the  Jews 
to  co-operate  with  him  in  his  scheme  of  a  Messianic 
insurrection.  Claudius  then  cut  the  movement  short  by 
his  order. 

By  way  of  conjecture  we  will  yet  propose,  that  the 
"  impulsor  Chrestus"  might  have  been  Paul,  to  whom  it 
happened  later  in  Palestine,  to  be  mistaken  by  a 
Roman  chief  captain  for  a  Chrestus,  or  Messiah,  see  Acts 
xxi.  38.  By  his  unheard-of  pretension  of  the  abrogation 
of  the  Mosaic  Law  and  his  attempted  fusion  of  Judaism 
and  heathendom  by  means  of  his  Christian  system,  it  is 
possible  that  he  brought  the  Jewish  inhabitants,  even  the 
Jewish  Christians  of  Rome,  to  a  pitch  of  rage  that  sought 
its  vent  in  loud  retorts  and,  perhaps,  even  assaults  upon 
him  and  his  retinue.  The  emperor  may  have  put  a  stop  to 
such  uproarious  scenes  by  his  order. 

As  to  the  discrepancy  between  the  account  of  Suetonius 
and  Dion  Cassius,  we  will  yet  mention  that  Schuerer,  '  The 
Jewish  People,  etc.,'  attempts  to  harmonize  both  by  sug- 
gesting that  the  word  "  expulit  "  used  by  the  former  writer 
means  only,  "  he  contemplated  to  expel,"  the  same  as  in 
the  analogous  case  of  the  decree  of  Tiberius  against  Chal- 
dean astrologers  ;  see  Suetonius,  on  Tiberius,  36. 

In  conclusion  we  may  be  permitted  to  suggest,  that 
Claudius'  proscription  of  Roman  Jews  must  not  at  once  be 
considered  as  prompted  by  a  decided  aversion  to  the  Jews 
as  a  nation,  or  to  their  religious  customs  We  have  to  bear 
in  mind  that  imperialism  was  very  sensitive  and  suspicious 
of  anti-monarchial  tendencies  coming  forward  within  its 
domain.  When  we  hold  in  view  the  persecutions  and  banish- 
ments which  the  Roman  philosophers,  in  particular  the 
Stoics,  endured  from  Nero,  Vespasian  and  Domitian,  we  will 
be  obliged  to  discard  the  prepossession  that  Claudius  and 
other  emperors  interfering  against  Jews  engaging  in 
tumultuous  movements  or  for  other  State  reasons,  were  at 
the  same  time  inspired  by  national  or  religious  hatred  to 
them.     The    fate   of  the   Roman  Jews   under   Claudius   was 


I02  Tnk  S'AI5bA'IH  in  rilS'lOKV. 

surely  not  any  worse  than  that  of  all  but  one  of  the  philoso- 
phers who  were  expelled  from  Rome  in  the  years  71-75  C. 
E.  Nor  was  it  equal  in  severity  to  the  persecution  visited 
on  this  class  by  Domitian,  in  93.  The  supposed  or  open 
republican  opposition  of  the  Stoic  philosophers  to  mon- 
archy was  mainly  the  cause  of  it.  Likewise  will  we  have  to 
judge  of  Claudius'  proceeding  against  the  Jews,  since  it  was 
called  forth  by  some  agitation  which  doubtless  appeared 
dangerous  to  the  government,  as  having  been  a  measure  of 
political  discipline  rather  than  a  national-religious  pro- 
scription. 

^^  Suetonius  who  passed  his  youth  in  Rome  under  Domi- 
tian, could  have  given  us  the  most  authentic  and  explicit 
account  of  that  imperial  act  of  inquisition.  But  he  has 
neglected  doing  so,  leaving  only  a  brief  notice  behind,  in 
which  he  does  not  mention  at  all  any  penal  proceedings 
against  Domitilla  and  many  other  Judaizers.  touching  even 
on  the  fate  of  Flavius  Clemens  only  in  the  few  words,  that 
the  emperor  "suddenly  punished  him  with  death  on  a  very 
slight  ( trivial )  suspicion  "  (  Domitian,  ch.  xv.). 

The  Christian  church  claims  Domitilla  as  her  own.  It 
makes  of  him  a  convert  to  Christianity.  Eusebius,  using 
Bruttius'  Annals,  has  fathered  this  tradition.  On  the 
strength  of  it  Christian  writers  qualify  Flavius  Clemens  as 
a  Christian,  too.  Both  pass  in  Church  history  as  martyrs. 
Chandler,  History  of  Persecution,  p.  45,  argues  in  favor  of 
the  theory  that  they  were  Christians,  from  the  view  that 
atheism  was  the  common  charge  laid  against  the  Christians, 
and  that  Domitian  was  not  known  to  have  persecuted  the 
Jews  for  their  religion.  The  same  opinion  Gibbon  pro- 
pounds ;  see  '  History  of  the  Decline  etc.,'  ii.  p.  25.  He 
contends  that  the  charge  of  atheism  and  Jewish  manners 
imputed  to  the  accused,  was  "  a  singular  association  of 
ideas  which  cannot  with  any  propriety  be  applied  except 
to  the  Christians."  We,  on  our  part,  cannot  however  per- 
ceive the  singularity  of  that  association.  Nor  is  there  in 
Dion's  account  such  an  association  only.  It  really  exhibits 
a  perfect  identification  of  both  the  charges  of  atheism  and 
Jewish  customs  (not  "manners").  By  these  customs  the 
Jewish  worship  and  religious  usuages  are  doubtless  under- 
stood. 

Dion  says  (Ixvii.  14):  "Both  were  indicted  for  athe- 
otes  " — which,  in  view  of  the  parallel  expression  'aseheia' 
used  by  him  in  connection  with  the  account  of  Nerva's 
clemency,  can  mean  nothing  else  than  irreligiousness,  that 
is,  a  defection  from  the  national  worship,  by  either  embrac- 
ing another  religion,  or  adhering  to  any  one  odious  philos- 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  IO3 

ophy  of  the  age,  or  being  otherwise  a  freethinking  despiser 
of  the  country-deities —  "  of  which  even  many  others  who 
had  fallen  away  to  the  customs  of  the  Jews  were  convicted." 

Can  the  thinking  reader  for  one  moment  doubt  that  he 
had  here  perfectly  identified  the  Jewish  customs  with 
atheism  ?  It  is  true,  he  holds  in  the  account  about  Nerva 
'  asebeia'  and  'Jewish  life'  apart.  He  says  of  this  emperor: 
"  He  did  not  permit  that  any  people  should  be  accused  of 
either  asebeia  ( irreligion,  godlessness  )  or  a  Jewish  (mode 
of)  life."  But  this  does  not  in  the  least  indicate  that  he 
had  in  the  former  notice  not  identified  both,  atheotes  and 
Jewish  customs.  No.  Dion  did  in  the  relation  about 
Nerva  not  in  the  least  think  of  contrasting  both  Roman 
offences.  They  were  in  the  two  accounts  identical  in  his 
mind.  In  both  of  them  he  used  irreligiousness,  which  he 
once  denoted  atheotes  and  then  again  asebeia,  as  a  generic 
atheistic  misdemeanor,  expressive  of  every  manner  of  deser- 
tion of  the  country-gods.  Only  that  he  conveyed,  in  the 
first-named  passage,  Jewish  religious  customs  as  directly 
included  in  the  term  atheotes,  whilst  in  the  other  he 
thought  it  important  enough  to  mention  yet  expressly 
Judaism,  because  this  religion  had  then  without  doubt  been 
the  most  widespread  and  popular  of  all  the  alien  ones  in 
Rome. 

It  could  readily  be  expected  from  Domitian,  infuriated  as 
we  hold  him  to  have  been  against  any  alien  worship  that 
had  gained  ascendency  in  Rome,  that  he  dealt  with  cruel 
decision  with  Judaizers  from  the  ranks  of  the  Latin  stock, 
who  committed  the  high  treason  of  denying  the  native 
tutelar  deities,  among  whom  he  himself  claimed  to  be 
ranked  as  Rome's  guardian  genius.  He  could  not  bear  to 
see  his  good  patricians  and  withal  his  superior  citizens 
affected  by  the  astounding  ideas  of  an  immaterial  God  and 
the  adoration  due  to  him  alone.  His  Roman  puritanism 
revolted  against  it,  as  it  was  the  case  with  Tiberius  before  him. 

Baur  (  Paul,  ii.  61  )  presents  also  the  ordinary  Christian 
conception,  that  Flavins  Clemens  was  an  adherent  of  Chris- 
tianity. He  grounds  it  not  only  on  the  charge  of  atheism 
stated  by  Dion,  but  on  the  "  most  contemptible  sloth  "  with 
which  he  is  reproached  in  Suetonius'  account.  This  sloth 
he  construes  into  a  lack  of  interest  in  the  politics  of  Rome, 
which  was  so  peculiar  to  the  Christians  as  a  class.  His 
misdemeanor  then  lay,  according  to  Baur,  not  so  much  in 
his  contemptible  political  inactivity  as  in  his  profession  of 
Christianity.  It  must  consequently,  however,  appear  very 
strange  that  Suetonius  should  not  at  once  have  called  the 
offence  by  its  right  name,  that  is,  Christianity  ! 


104  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Graetz,  History  of  the  Jews,  iv.  p.  43'?  sq.,  and  in  his 
essay,  "  The  Jewish  Proselytes  in  the  Roman  Empire,"  has, 
to  the  contrary,  raised  it  beyond  any  doubt,  that  in  Flavius 
Clemens  nothing  but  a  convert  to  Judaism  is  to  be  recog- 
nized. He  brings  to  bear  on  the  question  some  Jewish 
legends,  in  particular  those  of  the  Midrash  Rabb.  Deut.  ch. 
ii.  f.  2155  and  of  B.  Abodah  Zarah  f.  10.  which,  while  they 
are  far  from  being  directly  available  for  historical  use,  may 
yet  safely  be  adduced  for  the  elucidation  of  the  problem, 
whether  Flavius  Clemens  is  to  be  adjudged  a  convert  to 
Judaism  or  Christianity. 

In  the  two  before-named  places  a  Roman  dignitary 
figures  as  a  self-devoted  Judaizing  intercessor  to  rescue 
Israel  from  an  impending  expulsion  (or  extermination), 
or;ce  decreed  by  a  Roman  emperor  and  senate.  His  Juda- 
ism had  been  consummated  by  the  initiatory  rite.  This 
description  the  two  relations  have  in  common.  In  all  other 
points  they  differ  from  each  other.  The  Midrash  designates 
that  high  Roman  as  a  synkletos  "  senator."  The  Talmud 
produces  him  under  the  fantastic  name  Ketia  bar  Shalom. 
The  former  makes  him  take  poison  at  the  urgent  request 
of  his  wife  who  was  still  more  attached  to  Jews  and 
Judaism,  which  act  of  the  self-destruction  of  her  husband 
she  had  devised,  that  the  execution  of  the  imperial  decree 
against  the  Jews  would  be  stayed  and  the  sentence  ulti- 
mately nullified.  The  Talmud  makes  of  him  a  mere 
martyr  on  his  own  account,  and  that  only  in  a  certain 
Sense.  It  lets  him  suffer  involuntary  death  for  daring  to 
remonstrate  with  the  emperor  about  his  attempt  on  the 
Jews,  and  to  deprecate  it.  Whilst  he  succeeded  in  con- 
vincing him  alike  of  its  inefficiency  and  inexpedience, 
and  prevented  his  carrying  it  into  effect,  he  yet  was  guilty 
of  a  capital  crime,  consisting  in  the  confutation  of  an 
emperor  by  a  contradicting  argument,  for  which  he  incurred 
the  penalty  of  death  that  was  really,  as  it  is  alleged  there, 
inflicted  on  him.  The  woman  figures  in  this  passage 
also  as  more  devoutly  Judaizing  than  himself 

Now,  as  to  the  historical  availability  of  this  story  or 
these  stories  —  for  both  relations  differing  from  each  other 
indeed  more  than  they  agree  on  the  points  set  forth 
therein,  should  by  right  be  considered  as  two  separate 
accounts  —  we  assent  to  Graetz  in  so  far  as  to  discover  a 
latent  kernel  of  history  in  the  chaff  with  which  it  is  handed 
down  to  us.  But  we  can  by  no  means  subscribe  to  his 
opinion  (History  1.  c.  p.  436),  that  the  Midrashic  story  has 
a  "  sober  and  historical "  stamp.     It   positively  has   all  but 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  10$ 

this.  It  is  on  the  contrary  one  of  the  many  fantastic 
pieces  of  glorification  of  Israel,  gotten  up  to  illustrate  the 
occasional  self-sacrificing  acts  of  friendly  Gentiles,  in  which 
precious  little  regard  is  paid  to  real  history. 

Let  us  adduce  a  Rabbinical  counterpart  to  our  story, 
occurring  in  B.  Taanith  f  29,  which  the  reader  will  find 
totally  akin  to  it  as  to  tendency.  We  are  told  there  of  a 
Roman  ofificer  (senator  or  judge)  having  given  up  his  life  to 
save  that  of  Rabban  Gamaliel  in  the  period  of  the 
Hadrianic  persecution,  when  he  was  by  the  governor 
Tinnius  Rufus  condemned  to  death.  That  Roman  "lord" 
proposed  to  rescue  him  from  his  dire  fate,  if  he  would 
promise  him  under  oath  to  insure  him  entrance  into  the 
'  World  to  come.'  This  readily  done,  the  Roman  lord 
killed  himself  by  casting  himself  down  from  a  wall.  Thus 
Gamaliel's  life  was  saved.  For,  it  is  remarked  there, 
further,  the  rule  was,  that  if  one  of  the  judges  who  had 
passed  a  capital  sentence  died,  it  at  once  became  void. 

The  fabulousness  of  this  tale  is  too  obvious  and  glaring 
to  deserve  any  earnest  attention  except  from  the  view 
of  curiosity.  The  reader  will  at  once  conclude  from  the 
fabric  of  its  impossibilities  and  inaccuracies,  that  it  is 
nothing  but  a  tendency-fiction,  devised  by  a  credulous 
author  or,  at  any  rate,  for  credulous  masses,  to  exhibit 
another  specimen  of  magnanimous  self-devotion  of  pagan 
patrons  to  Jews  and  Judaism.  It  is  assuredly  of  the  same 
type  as  that  of  the  Midrash  under  discussion. 

But  yet  we  cannot  altogether  reject  the  latter  as  bare 
of  every  true  historical  reminiscence.  Dion's  attestation  of 
the  two  high  Roman  personages  having  leaned  on  Judaism 
and  the  penalty  which  the  cruel  emperor  had  inflicted  on 
them  therefor,  may  safely  be  held  as  the  original  substance 
of  which  the  legendary  web  presented  in  the  Midrash  and 
Talmud  was  woven.  The  historical  fact  that  Flavins  and 
Domitilla  were  as  devout  Judaizers  cruelly  punished  for  per- 
sisting in  the  religion  they  had  newly  embraced,  was 
doubtless  delivered  to  the  fervent  memory  of  succeeding 
ages  in  Israel.  The  inference  of  their  being  most  friendly 
to  the  Jews  and  showing  them  many  favors, was  easily  drawn 
from  that  traditional  circumstance.  And  as  tradition  had, 
further,  presumably  preserved  many  an  occasion  from  the 
reign  of  the  cruel  emperor  Domitian,  on  which  interference 
for  the  sake  of  Israel  was  pressingly  needed  at  the  hands 
of  Roman  men  of  influence,  those  two  martyrs  offered 
themselves  readily  for  the  origination  of  legends,  such  as 
we  meet  with  in  the  above-cited  relations  of  the  Midrash 
and  Talmud. 


I06  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

'■^^  Josephus,  Against  Apion,  ii.  40,  states  the  Judaizing 
character  of  a  "  multitude  of  mankind  from  inclination," 
and  that  there  is  "no  nation  whatsoever,  whither  our 
custom  of  resting  on  the  seventh  day  hath  not  come,  and 
by  which  our  fasts  and  lighting  up  lamps  (on  Sabbaths  and 
festivals  comp.  ib,  lO),  and  many  of  our  prohibitions  as  to 
our  food,  are  not  observed." 

His  representation,  dating  from  the  end  of  the  first 
century  of  our  era,  and  delineating  as  it  evidently  does  the 
practical  observance  of  Jewish  rites  by  Gentile  Judaizers 
along  that  period,  is  borne  out  by  Juvenal,  Sat.  xiv.,  who 
mentions  about  the  same  religious  customs  of  proselytes  to 
Judaism.  He  left  out  the  fasts,  because  they  were  to  him 
doubtless  included  in  '  Sabbata  ; '  also  the  lighting  of 
lamps,  which  is  easily  thought  to  have  been  comprised  in 
the  'fear  of  the  Sabbata.' 

Let  us  remark  here  in  passing,  that  with  Juvenal's 
"  metuentem  Sabbata"  and  Persius'  "  Sabbata  palles,"  which 
phrases  are  expressive  of  awe-struck  reverence  felt  by 
proselytes  towards  the  Sabbath,  may  be  compared  the 
Talmudical  Emath  Shabbath  "fear  of  the  Sabbath." 

As  to  Josephus'  enumeration  of  Jewish  rites  adopted  by 
a  multitude  of  Gentiles,  we  must  not  at  once  conclude  that 
all  those  heathens  who  were,  according  to  his  testimony, 
practicing  them,  had  conceived  a  sincere  attachment  for 
Israel  and  devotion  to  their  God,  and  that  they  were  if  not 
full,  at  least  half-proselytes.  There  were  without  doubt  a 
number  of  them  whose  minds  had  not  turned  to  the  true 
God,  but  who,  loathing  the  trite  ceremonies  of  their  own 
country-religion,  or  moved  by  a  certain  superstitious 
preference,  chose  some  Jewish  religious  rites,  whilst  they 
yet  remained  within  the  pale  and  the  fetters  of  polytheism. 

We  will  not,  to  prove  this,  refer  to  Riley's  proposition 
quoted  above,  that  Ovid  in  speaking  of  the  "seventh 
holy-day  observed  by  the  Jew,  etc.,"  as  the  dav  on  which 
ladies  were  to  be  met  at  the  synagogues,  had  before  his 
mind  the  custom  of  pagan  Roman  ladies  to  visit  there 
from  sheer  curiosity,  who  were  all  but  devout  worshipers 
of  Israel's  God.  This  explanation  would  indeed  carry  with 
it  a  decided  moment  of  doubt  as  to  many  other  cases  of 
supposed  Sabbath  observance  by  Gentiles,  which  might 
have  consisted  in  nothing  else  than  their  attendance,  upon 
some  outward  motive,  at  Jewish  synagogues,  but  yet  caused 
the  impression  that  a  sincere  religious  disposition  and 
conviction    of   the    truth    of    Judaism    had    drawn    them 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  10/ 

thither.  But  as  that  commentator's  view  lacks  every  internal 
evidence,  and  it  is  certainly  possible  that  the  poet  alluded 
to  real  God-fearing  Roman  women  of  pagan  extraction,  we 
must  not  bring  it  to  bear  on  our  question. 

A  rather  reliable  testimony  as  to  the  co-existence  of 
polytheism  with  the  practice  of  Jewish  rites,  is  furnished 
us,  however,  from  another  source.  Tertullian,  the  Mon- 
tanist  church  Father  who  flourished  in  the  latter  part  of  the 
second  century,  apologetically  argues  in  his  treatise  'On 
Fasting'  (Works,  vol.  iii.  Aiite-Nicene  Libr.  ed.)  against 
the  so-called  Psychics,  who  had  opposed  the  few  special 
fasts  of  the  Christians,  that  the  custom  of  holding  fasts  was 
so  genuinely  adapted  to  religious  minds  that  it  was  found 
even  among  heathens.  Even  they,  he  reasons,  recognize 
every  form  of  "humiliation  of  spirit."  "When  the  heaven 
is  rigid  and  the  year  arid,  barefooted  processions  are 
enjoined  by  public  proclamation."  That  here  the  adopted 
features  of  the  Jewish  communal  fasts  for  rain  are  brought 
forward,  will  at  once  strike  the  reader  as  probable. 
TertuUian's  subsequent  exposition  renders  it  the  more 
plausible.  He  continues:  "There  are  moreover  some 
colonies  where,  besides,  [the  inhabitants],  by  an  annual 
rite,  clad  in  sackcloth  and  besprent  with  ashes,  present  a 
suppliant  importunity  to  their  idols.  ^  ^  *  There  is,  I 
believe,  a  Ninevitan  suspension  of  business  !  A  Jewish 
fast,  at  all  events,  is  universally  (that  is,  everywhere  in 
those  colonies)  celebrated  ;  while,  neglecting  the  temples, 
throughout  all  the  shore,  in  every  open  place,  they  continue 
long  to  send  prayer  up  to  heaven."     *     *     -^^ 

Who  will  not  at  once  recognize  in  this  heathen  rite  an 
imitation  of  the  Jewish  Atonement  day .-"  But  it  was 
outward  only.  Those  pagans,  whoever  they  were— Tertul- 
lian was  not  explicit  enough  to  describe  their  nationality 
and  locality — had  in  some  way  learned  of  the  great  annual 
Fast  of  the  Jews,  and  seen  fit  to  adopt  it  as  part  of  their 
ritual,  whilst  they  never  thought  of  leaving  off  their 
idolatry  on  this  account.  The  heathen  custom  of  fasts  for 
rain,  represented  by  Tertullian  as  a  rather  general  one 
among  idolatrous  nations,  seems  likewise  to  have  been 
borrowed  from  Judaism.  But  were  they  by  it  any  nearer  to 
the  real  Jewish  religion,  especially  its  ground-principle. 
Monotheism  ?     By  no  means. 

We  have  accordingly  to  suggest  that  the  apparent 
Judaizing  with  which  many  an  ancient  observer  met  among 
some  pagan  people  in  certain  lands,  may  have  misled  him 
to  take  it  for  a  true  and  real  conversion,  or  at  least  for  a 

(8) 


I08  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Strong  devotion  to  Judaism,  while  it  was  in  fact  a  mere 
outward  imitation  of  some  Jewish  ritual  observances, 
alongside  of  which  those  pagans  may  have  been  addicted 
to  the  grossest  forms  of  idolatry.  How  much  Josephus  or 
the  authorities  upon  which  he  based  his  above  assertion, 
might  have  been  affected  by  deceptive  impressions  of  that 
kind,  we  have  no  means  of  ascertaining. 

^  The  reason  why  this  rite  vexed  them,  as  it  seems, 
most,  is  doubtless,  because  it  was  in  their  eyes  the  pitch 
and  therefore  formed  the  criterion  of  denationalization. 
That  this  view  prevailed  among  the  pagans,  we  may  infer 
from  the  circumstance  that  Tacitus  (Hist.  v.  5,  25)  lets  the 
contempt  of  Roman  Judaizers  for  their  nationality  follow 
immediately,  in  the  same  sentence,  after  his  mention  of 
their  practicing  the  rite  of  circumcision.  This  necessa'rily 
impresses  one  that  he  meant  to  convey  the  notion  that  that 
contempt  was  the  inevitable  result  of  the  initiatory  rite,  as 
being  the  unambiguous  symbol  of  casting  ofif  the  old  and 
putting  on  the  new  nationality — Judaism.  He  says  there  : 
"Those  em.bracing  their  religion  practice  the  same  (namely, 
circumcision),  and  they  are  early  impressed  with  nothing 
sooner  than  to  contemn  the  gods,  to  cast  off  (the  allegiance 
to)  their  country,  and  to  despise  their  parents,  children, 
brothers." 

The  same  local  and  loc^ical  sequence  we  find  in  Juvenal, 
Sat.  xiv.  Discoursing  there  on  the  children  of  Roman 
proselytes  to  Judaism,  he  declares,  "soon  they  are  circum- 
cised, too.  But  they  are  used  to  contemn  the  Roman  laws, 
and  learn,  observe  and  revere  the  Jewish  law,  etc."  That 
this  juxtaposition  and  connection  is  not  accidental  in  either 
writer,  but  was  intended  to  insinuate  what  we  suggested, 
the  reader  will  readily  allow. 

Our  view  may  be  substantiated,  further,  from  Josephus, 
Ant.  XX.  2,  4.  He  reports  that  the  mother  of  King  Izates  of 
Adiabene  objected  to  his  decision  of  consummating  his 
conversion  to  Judaism  by  undergoing  the  performance  of  the 
rite,  that  "he  would  thereby  bring  himself  into  great  odium 
among  his  subjects,  when  they  should  understand  that  he 
was  so  fond  of  rites  that  were  to  them  strange  and  foreign.'* 

We  suggest,  by-the-way,  that  Hadrian's  prohibition  of 
circumcision,  while  it  was  surely  not  the  only  original 
cause  of  the  tremendous  uprising  of  the  Jews,  as  Spartianus 
relates,  but  was  perhaps  imposed  on  them  in  penalty  for  it 
after  it  had  been  subdued  by  the  Roman  forces  (see  Graetz, 
History,  etc.,  iv.  p.  451),  was  likely  intended  by  that  em- 
peror as  a  most  crushing  blow  at  once  at  the  Jewish  religion 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  IO9 

and  nationality,  since  he  knew  well  that  it  was  the  indis- 
pensable sign  of  the  religious-national  identity  of  the  Jews, 
and  their  demarcation  from  all  the  other  nations  of  the 
empire. 

That  the  prohibition  might  not  h.ive  h.id  any  religious- 
national  bearing,  was  again  and  but  recently  advanced  by 
Mommsen,  'Provinces  of  the  Roman  Empire,'  ii.  His  older 
predecessor  in  this  opinion,  Casaubonus,  is  quoted  by 
Muenter,  '  The  Jewish  war  under  the  emperors  Trajan  and 
Hadrian,'  p.  36. 

^"^The  Roman  writers  Juvenal  and  Tacitus  knew  or 
noticed  converts  to  Judaism  only  by  the  mark  of  the  rite 
of  circumcision.  This  deserves  special  remark  the  more, 
since  several  modern  writers  exaggerate  the  proportions 
of  the  so-called  God-fearing  proselytes,  who  had  connected 
themselves  with  Israel  without  the  submission  to  this  rite. 
Tacitus'  direct  statement,  "Those  embracing  their  religion 
practice  the  same,"  allows  of  no  other  construction,  than 
that  he  had  before  his  mi-.id  and  knew  of  no  other  than 
such  full  converts.  Had  he  known  of  any  cases  of  Judaizing 
without  the  acceptance  of  that  rite,  he  would  surely  have 
mentioned  them.  The  same  is  true  of  Juvenal,  in  the 
satire  quoted  above.  Even  if  his  words  "soon  they  are 
circumcised  too,"  should  have  to  be  taken  as  expressive 
of  a  gradual  advance  from  other  Jewish  religious  usages  to 
circumcision  as  the  final  act  of  their  initiation  into  the 
Jewish  communion,  we  still  contend  that  he  thought  of  this 
concluding  act  as  the  fixed  rule  and  custom,  and  these  not 
left  optional  with  the  sons  of  proselyte  parents,  but  obli- 
gatory on  them.  We  insist — supposing  the  perception 
of  progression  in  time  was  the  only  correct  one  in  the 
context — that  he  wished  to  convey  in  that  passage  that,  as 
the  converted  fathers  were  circumcised,  so  will  the  sons  be, 
only  that  these  were  in  their  earlier  childhood  first  being 
trained  to  regular  Jewish  observances,  and  ultimately,  at  a 
later,  more  convenient  period,  the  initiatory  rite  was  per- 
formed on  them  also.  But  we  can  allow  that  perception 
only  provisionally.  There  is  indeed  no  cogent  evidence, 
that  Juvenal  used  the  word  mox  "  soon"  in  the  strict  sense 
of  temporal  progression.  In  poetical  works  a  small  word 
or  phrase  inserted  in  the  context,  often  serves  only  to 
round  off  the  rythmic  form,  and  its  literalness  must  not  be 
pressed  at  all.  The  adverb  "  soon  "  may  accordingly  have 
suggested  itself  to  the  author  on  going  on  in  his  com- 
position as  a  metric  stop-gap  at  the  very  point  where  we 
find  it  placed,  while  his  mind  was  far  fiom  expressing  the 
idea  of  temporal  succession. 


I  lO  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

Be  this  as  it  may,  thus  much  appears  as  most  certain 
at  least,  that  Juvenal's  sentence  in  point  allows  of  no  other 
interpretation  than  that  he  reflected  on  the  circumcision 
of  the  sons  of  Roman  proselytes,  and  implicitly  on  that 
of  the  fathers  themselves,  as  the  settled  rule,  knowing  of 
no  other  mode  of  admission  to  the  fold  of  Judaism. 

But  such  view  did  not  alone  prevail  in  the  minds  of  the 
named  Roman  writers.  We  may  lay  it  down  .as  a  certainty 
that  the  distinguishing  mark,  by  which  proselytes  were 
commonly  known  and  judged  in  the  whole  Greco-Roman 
world,  alike  by  Gentiles  and  Jews,  was  the  acceptance 
of  the  initiatory  rite  and  the  Mosaic  religion  in  general. 
As  to  the  Jews,  it  unmistakably  appears  from  the  various 
relative  accounts  of  Josephus,  that  they  would  ordinarily 
approve  of  no  other  conversions  than  those  attended  with 
circumcision.  He  would  himself,  while  he  was  tolerant 
enough  to  discountenance  compulsory  circumcision  of 
pagans  (see  Life,  sect.  23),  yet  recognize  a  merit  of  triie 
piety  only  in  such  voluntary  conversions  to  Judaism,  as 
were  accompanied  by  the  self-imposition  of  that  rite  (see 
Ant.  XX.  2,  4,  end).  Nor  is%there  any  warrant  for  that 
license  in  the  interpretation  of  the  term  sebomenoi  ton 
theon  "worshiping  God,"  occurring  in  his  works,  by  which 
some  modern  writers  attempt  to  prove  their  exaggerated 
view  of  mere  outward  Judaizers  having  formed  that  large 
contingent  ot  proselytes,  known  to  have  existed  in  that 
century  almost  everywhere  in  the  Greco-Roman  .world. 
[On  the  whole,  we  have  to  reproach  a  number  of  modern 
writers  with  being  altogether  too  boldly  conjectural  in  their 
view  on  the  so-called  God-fearing  of  the  Judaic-Grecian 
literature.  In  Voelter's  'The  Revelation  of  John,  etc.,'  p.  8, 
we  learn  of  the  theologian  Harnaek  having  discovered 
in  those  "  fearing  the  name  of  God  "  of  Rev.  xi.  18.  prose- 
lytes to  Judaism.  Voelter  disputes  this  and  contends  for 
the  view,  that  pagan  proselytes  to  Christianity  were  there 
understood.  But  neither  exposition  is  justified  by  the  text. 
Those  authors  are  too  prepossessed  by  the  notion  that  a 
God-fearing  must  be  a  proselyte.  John  has  in  our  opinion 
merely  borrowed  in  xi.  18,  as  he  did  in  xix.  5,  from  Ps.  cxv. 
13.  alluding  to  no  proselytes  at  all. 

Even  the  conservative  Ewald,  in  his  History  of  Israel,  vol. 
vii.,  would  trace  proselytes  in  the  God-fearing  of  several 
Psalms.  We  admit  the  remote  possibility  that  e.  g.  in  Ps. 
cxviii.  4,  which  he  also  mentions,  proselytes  were  meant. 
But  there  is  in  fact  no  internal  or  lingual  evidence  what- 
ever for  such  an    assumption.       The  "Yirai"-or    "Abhdai 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  I  I  I 

Jehovah "  of  Scripture  are  generally  —  and  we  prefer  to 
think  in  all  instances — nothing  but  Israelites  devoutly 
revering  God.  They  are  identical  with  the  Tsadikim 
"  righteous  "  or  "  pious  ;  "     comp.  Mai.  iii.  i6,  i8. 

Some  of  our  ancient  Rabbis  have  already  indulged  in  the 
exegetical  venture  of  discovering  proselytes  in  the  "Yirai 
Jehovah"  of  some  passages  of  Scripture,  thus  setting  the 
example  to  modern  writers  to  do  likewise.  But  they  had 
no  more  authority  for  doing*  so,  than  the  latter  have.  In 
Rabb.  Lev.  ch.  iii.,  for  instance,  the  God-tearing  of  P.s.  xxii. 
24,  are  explained  to  mean  proselytes.  But  there  is  actually 
no  plausible  reason,  why  it  should  have  been  so  explained. 
The  God-fearing  of  that  verse  are,  we  aver,  none  other  as 
to  national  extraction  than  those  of  the  "seed  of  Jacob  and 
of  Israel,"  named  therein  afterwards.  The  latter  two 
appellations  are  solely  parallels  of  the  first,  such  as 
Scripture  exhibits  in  numberless  instances.  Moreover,  the 
Psalmist  can  surely  not  be  supposed  to  have  distinguished 
those  "  God-fearing"  by  placing  them  ahead  of  "  the  seed 
of  Jacob  and  Israel,"  had  they  been  meant  for  proselytes. 
Our  objection  holds  good  against  the  same  construction 
put  on  the  God-fearing  of  Ps.  cxxviii.  i,  in  Rabb.  Numb, 
ch.  viii.  A  more  forced  interpretation  than  this  Rabbinical 
one  could  not  have  been  ventured  !  ] 

Let  us  observe  that  the  "  worshipers  of  God  "  reported  in 
Ant.  xiv.  7,  2,  as  having  everywhere  joined  the  Jews  in 
sending  contributions  to  the  Temple,  cannot  have  been 
others  than  full  proselytes.  Not  only  is  it  not  conceivable 
that  half-proselytes  should  universally  have  taken  such 
fervid  interest  in  the  national  sanctuary  as  to  help 
maintaining  it.  but  the  analogy  of  the  use  of  the  title 
'sebomenoi'  in  Acts  xiii.  43.  where  it  either  designates  full 
proselytes  or  comprises  them  at  least,  precludes  the 
supposition  that  Josephus  understood  by  it  only  partial 
converts.  When,  further,  Josephus  relates  in  Wars  vii.  3, 
3,  that  the  Jews  were  "continuously  gaining  over  large 
numbers  of  Greeks  through  their  religious  rites  and  thus 
making  them,  after  a  sort,  a  portion  of  themselves,"  it 
would  show  the  most  ignorant  disregard  for  the  known 
facts  of  history  to  assume,  that  he  meant  by  these  Greek 
converts  none  but  half-proselytes.  The  Jews  had  at  no 
time  made  converts  a  "  portion  of  themselves  after  a  sort," 
unless  these  were  previously  consecrated  by  the  rites  of 
initiation  and  solemnly  assumed  to  conform  to  the  Mosaic 
religion.     Moreover,  the  privileged  and  flourishing  condition 


ri2  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

oi  the  Jewish  citizens  in  which  he  presents  them  there,  can 
leave  no  doubt,  that  they  will  have  made  their  own  uncom- 
promising terms  to  those  who  wished  to  join  their 
eommunity  as  equal  members. 

We  incline  to  think  that  both  Josephus  and  the  author  of 
Acts,  have  in  the  passages  quoted  before  (comp.  Acts,  ib. 
V.  26)  employed  the  appellation  sebomenoi  "  worshiping 
God  "  in  a  generic  sense,  that  is,  for  all  proselytes,  whether 
full  or  partial,  and  that  in  contradistinction  from  born  Jews. 
This  appellation,  we  further  suggest,  was  commonly  pre- 
ferred in  Greek-speaking  Jewish  communities  to  the  other, 
foboumenoi  "God-fearing,"  for  denoting  proselytes,  though 
the  latter  title  corresponded  more  directly,  because  literally, 
to  the  Scriptural  "  Yirai  Jehovah"  (for  which  latter  word  the 
Rabbis  were  accustomed  to  use  Shamayim  "  Heaven  " ).  In 
Acts,  at  least,  where  proselytes  are  so  often  noted,  the  word 
sebomenoi  is  almost  exclusively  employed  for  proselytes. 
It  strikes  us  as  most  probable  that  the  Rabbis,  who  by-the- 
way  make  a  very  sparse  use  of  the  term  '  Yere  Shamayim,' 
adhering  more  generally  to  the  Mosaic  name  'Ger,'  had 
originally,  like  Josephus  and  the  author  of  Acts  in  said  pas- 
sages, adopted  it  as  the  generic  designation  of  proselytes, 
without  regard  to  the  mode  of  their  admission  and 
the  range  of  Mosaic  precepts  they  were  to  have  aecepted. 
It  stands  at  all  events  in  such  a  generic  bearing  in  Rabb. 
Numb.  ch.  viii.  In  other  places  of  the  Rabbinical  literature, 
again,  it  is  used  in  contrast  with  Ger  Tsedek,  a  "true  (cir- 
cumcised) proselyte;"  so  in  Rabb.  Lev.  ch.  iii.;  Mechilta  ch. 
xviii.  The  question  whether  in  those  passages  in  which 
the  two  terms  are  opposites,  the  Yere  Shamayim  corres- 
ponded entirely  to  the  Ger  Toshab  of  the  Talmud,  is  not 
so  easy  to  solve,  considering  the  indecision  of  the  olden 
Rabbis  concerning  the  needed  qualification  of  the  latter- 
named  proselyte.  There  are  indeed  three  relative  diver- 
gent opinions  of  Rabbis  of  the  second  century  C.  E. 
reported  in  B.  Abodah  Zarah,  f  64.  But  this  much 
may  be  taken  for  certain,  that  the  title  Yere  Sham- 
ayim was  by  the  Rabbis  intended  to  serve  as  the 
equivalent  of  the  Greek  terms  sebomenos  "God-worship- 
ing" or  foboumenos  "God-fearing."  It  varied  in  application, 
we  propose,  as  likewise  these  Greek  terms  did  with  the 
Greek-speaking  or  writing  Jews  or  Jewish  Christians.  It 
once  designates  the  proselytes  as  a  class,  and  again,  in  con- 
trast to  the  formal  converts,  the  partial  ones. 

In  the  latter  application  Josephus  wished  without  doubt 
to  characterize  Poppaea,  the  wife  of  the  emperor  Nero,  when 
he  calls  her  theosebes  "  God- worshiping  "  (Ant.  xx.  8,  11). 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  II 3 

She  had,  we  suggest,  turned  away  from  polytheism  and  pro- 
fessed the  Unity  of  God — as  so  many  women  of  rank,  wealth 
and  superior  intelligence  appear  to  have  done  in  the  first 
century  of  our  era  in  Grecian  communities  as  well  (see  Acts 
xiii.  $0,  xvii.  54).  ^^d  as  many  other  women,  wives  of 
Greeks  or  Syro-Greeks,  are  reported  to  have  done  (see 
Wars  ii.  20,  2,  Acts  xvi,  14) — ,  attending  perhaps  also  at 
times  at  Jewish  places  of  worship. 

Likewise  were  the  many  "Judaizers"  in  the  cities  of 
Syria,  from  the  description  Josephus  gives  of  them  in  Wars 
ii.  18.  2,  in  connection  with  the  affairs  at  the  beginning  of 
the  Jewish  revolutionary  war,  mere  nominal  adherents  of 
Judaism  by  the  profession  of  Monotheism,  the  attachment 
for  which  they  may  have  solely  evinced  by  visiting  the 
synagogues  more  or  less  regularly  on  days  of  Divine  service, 
on  which  latter  account  the  Judaizers  everywhere  may  pre- 
eminently have  received  the  title  sebomenoi  "worshipers 
of  God."  Their  monotheistic  leaning  on  Judaism  was  pos- 
sibly, besides,  marked  by  some  other  Jewish  ritual  observ- 
ances, such,  that  is,  as  they  found  congenial  to  their  minds. 

To  such  kind  of  proselytes  Josephus  doubtless  adverted 
also  in  his  polemical  treatise  'Against  Apion  '  ii.  40,  where  he 
attributes  to  "a  multitude  of  mankind  "  a  "  great  inclination 
of  a  long  time  to  follow  our  religious  observances  ;  "  comp., 
also  ib.  sect,  ii,  in  which  passage,  however,  formal  conver- 
sions may  have  to  be  understood. 

And  of  such  half-proselytes,  bearing  the  name  of  God- 
worshiping  or  God-fearing,  there  must  have  been  large 
numbers  in  Egypt  and  Cyrene,  as  Strabo  bears  witness 
(cited  by  Josephus,  Ant.  xiv.  7,  2),  in  Syria  and  the 
Decapolis,  as  is  attested  by  Josephus  in  various  places,  and 
in  Asia  Minor,  Macedonia  and  Greece,  as  it  is  evident 
from  many  passages  in  Acts  (see  besides  the  before-quoted, 
xvii.  17,  xviii,  4,6,  7).  and  certainly  in  the  Jewish  land 
proper. 

They  were  in  Palestine  as  in  the  other  countries  of  the 
Greco-Roman  world  received  as  welcome  additions,  although 
they  were  reluctant  to  enter  as  full  members  of  the  Jewish 
communion  by  a  thorough  conversion  to  Mosaism,  as  long 
as  they  solemnly  adopted  the  monotheistic  creed  and 
renounced  every  vestige  of  adhesion  to  polytheism.  The 
Jewish  authorities  of  Palestine  may  have  imposed  on  such 
neophites  the  so-called  seven  Noachian  precepts,  although 
if  these  alone  had  been  asked,  there  would,  from  a  Rabbini- 
cal view,  not  have  been  any  difference  between  them  and 
any  other  pagans  who  were  unconverted,  since  they  were 


114  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

incumbent  on  them  as  well  —  an  objection  which  is  already- 
uttered  in  the  Talmud  (  B.  Ab.  Zarah,  1.  c.)  against  the 
opinion,  that  those  seven  precepts  constituted  the  obliga- 
tion of  a  Ger  Toshab  "  half-proselyte." 

In  the  various  countries  of  the  Dispersion  a  thorough 
renunciation  of  every  trace  of  polytheism  and  a  sincere 
profession  of  the  foundation- principle  of  Judaism  may  have 
sufficed  for  their  limited  admission.  The  acquisition  of 
such  converts,  it  is  safe  to  assert,  gave  nowhere  and  at  no 
time  that  satisfaction  to  the  Jewish  proselytism  which  it 
expected.  But  it  was  provisionally  contented  with  such 
trophies  of  Monotheism,  in  especial  since  it  always  held 
the  end  in  view,  that  by  degrees  the  new  converts  would 
submit  to  the  initiatory  rite  and  become  devoted  to  the 
entire  Mosaic  religion.  Preliminarily  they  were  accorded 
a  distant  fellowship  with  Israel,  and  surely  they  enjoyed 
all  the  rights  and  privileges  prescribed  for  the  Ger  in  the 
Pentateuch.  Perfect  fellowship,  religious-national  equality, 
however,  they  could  attain  only  by  their  formal  transition. 

Those  modern  writers  therefore,  among  them  Schuerer, 
'  History  of  the  Jewish  People,'  and  Mommsen,  '  Provinces, 
etc.,'  who  advance  the  theory,  that  those  proselytes  desig- 
nated in  the  Greek-Jewish  or  Jewish-Christian  literature  as 
'  God-fearing  '  or  '  God-worshiping'  (  both  terms  are  used 
interchangeably  in  Acts  xiii.  26  and  43),  were  indiscrimin- 
ately ranked  as  equal  accessions  among  the  race  and  nation 
of  Israel,  at  certain  periods  and  in  Grecian  communities  at 
least,  greatly  err  and  misrepresent  the  status  and  standard 
of  the  pious,  national  Israel  of  the  ages  of  antiquity.  This 
theory  would  already  be  refuted  by  the  circumstance,  which 
certainly  should  not  have  escaped  their  notice,  that  the  great 
sensation  and  alarm  which  Paul's  and  Barnabas'  anti-cove- 
nant conversions  in  Antioch,  Syria,  had  created  among  the 
Palestinian  Jewish  Christians,  could  never  have  occurred, 
had  it  been  the  rule  in  the  Grecian  communities  to  recog- 
nize uncircumcised  Judaizers  as  real  Jews.  Ewald,  History 
of  Israel,  vii.,  has  the  almost  correct  perception  of  those 
God-fearing  proselytes.  He  lets  them  be  regarded  solely 
as  partial  members  of  the  Jewish  communities.  We,  on 
our  part,  differ  from  him  only  in  that  we  ask  discernment 
being  used  in  all  places  in  which  the  title  occurs,  since  it 
stands  sometimes,  as  set  forth  above,  generically,  including 
both  species,  the  whole  and  the  partial  converts,  and  may 
in  single  cases  denote  as  well  whole  as  partial  ones. 

A  few  cosmopolitan  compositions,  such  as  the  pseudo- 
graph  moral  poem  of  Phocylides  (Ewald  adjudges  this 
production    to    the    early  times    of  the    Ptolemies),  or  the 


THE  SABCATH  IN  HISTORY.  1  I  5 

address  to  the  Gentiles  in  the  fourth  book  of  the  Sibylline 
Oracles  (  written  about  80  C.  E.,  and  probably  of  Jewish 
origin  ;  so  Schuerer  ),  in  which  the  worship  of  the  true 
God  attended  by  righteousness  of  life  is  more  or  less 
directly  put  forth  as  the  only  requisite  for  a  welcome 
entrance  into  Israel's  communion,  must  not  be  held  out  as 
the  expression  of  the  religious  disposition  regarding  prose- 
lytes, predominant  among  the  body  of  the  true  and  orthodox 
Jews  of  the  Dispersion.  (  Hilgenfeld,  'Judaism  and  Jewish 
Christianity,'  p.  33,  attributes  this  Sibylline  book  to  an 
Essene  or  Essene-like  Baptist.  In  this  case  the  book  could 
the  less  be  referred  to  as  offering  a  standard  by  which  to 
measure  the  disposition  of  orthodox  Judaism.)  They  were 
individual  sentiments,  shared  yet  at  most  by  a  few 
other  philosophically  cultured  Jews.  Yet  the  generality  of 
the  Jewish  people  wou'ld  not  countenance  such  liberal 
ideas,  nor  permit  them  being  put  in  practice. 

Neither  must,  in  this  question,  reference  be  made  to 
Philo's  relative  reasonings,  and  the  proposition  derived 
from  them,  as  it  is  done  by  Schuerer,  that  Hellenistic  Juda- 
ism was  much  more  inclined  to  a  free  reception  of  Gentile 
proselytes,  if  they  but  adopted  the  worship  of  the  true  God, 
because  it  considered  the  Abrahamic  descent  "only  as  a 
secondary  matter  after  all."  To  Philo,  we  positively 
object,  such  descent  was  by  no  means  only  of  a  secondary 
concern.  It  was  to  him  of  as  primary  an  importance  as  it 
can  be  imagined  to  have  been  to  the  most  devout  Rabbi  of 
any  school  in  Palestine.  Much  as  he  exalts  "  the  proselyte 
who  has  come  over  to  God  of  his  own  accord"  (  On  Curses, 
ch.  vi.),  he  nevertheless  would  not  hold  him  equal  to  the 
born  Israelite.  And  notvvithstar.ding  his  philosophical 
universalism  in  pronouncing  virtue  as  the  only  preference 
valued  by  God,  he  firmly  adhered  to  the  notion  of  Israel's 
special  choice  from  all  the  nations  and  predilection  by  God. 

"  Israel  has  been  selected  from  all  mankind  and  appor- 
tioned to  the  Creator  and  Father  as  a  sort  of  first-firuit." 
This  superiority  is  inherited  by  the  race  from  their  most 
righteous  and  virtuous  ancestors  —  reasons  he  in  '  On  the 
Creation  of  Magistrates,'  ch.  vi. 

Israel,  "the  most  God-beloved  of  all  the  nations,"  was  to 
him  appointed  and  consecrated  to  be  the  "  priests  and 
prophets  to  all  mankind  "  (  On  Abraham  ). 

The  twelve  tribes  over  whom  Moses  pronounced  his  en- 
treaties of  blessing  before  his  demise,  were  "of  noble  descent 
and  noble  birth,  ranked  highest  by  the  Commander,  the 
Maker  of  all  things  and  Father"  (On  Humanity,  ch.  iv). 
Those  blessings,  he  proposes  there,  are  yet  to  be  fulfilled  ; 


Il6  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

his  implicit  view  beinj]^,  that  even  the  latest  generations  of 
Israel  would  be  titled  inheritors  of  that  ancestral  nobility 
and  superior  rank.  He  argues  there,  further,  that  "  Moses 
alone  had  from  the  beginning  perceived  the  closest  rela- 
tionship in  which  the  whole  nation  of  Israel  would  stand  to 
the  Divine,  a  relationship  much  more  genuine  than  that  of 
blood."  (See  on  all  these  and  kindred  passages,  Gfoerer, 
'Primitive  Christianity'  i.  p.  486,  sq.).  It  is,  from  the  fore- 
going, clear  enough,  that  Philo  was  as  fervently  national,  as 
any  most  orthodox  Rabbi  could  ever  have  been.  He 
emphasized  Israel's  nobility  of  descent  and  superior  estima- 
tion by  God  as  pointedly,  as  any  orthodox  Jew  in  the  heart 
of  the  nation's  capital  could  have  done.  And  yet  would 
that  author  impute  to  him  the  universalistic  position  of 
accounting  '  God-worshiping'  converts  from  paganism,  who 
had  not  formally  passed  over  to  Judaism,  as  equally  privi- 
leged members  of  the  Jewish  nation  ! 

What  passages  from  Philo  could  be  alluded  to  as  war- 
ranting such  a  position  ?  In  'On  Repentance,'  ch.  i.,  where 
he  expresses  the  loftiest  religious  and  humanitarian  senti- 
ment, that  those  who  have  turned  from  polytheism  to 
monotheism,  should  be  regarded  as  "  our  friends  and  kins- 
men," he  has  been  but  an  enthusiastic  exponent  of  Lev.  xix. 
34  and  Deut.  x.  19.  And  what  else  can  be  justly  proved 
from  'On  Monarchy,'  ch.  vii.,  but  that  he  reproduced  the 
pith  of  the  various  injunctions  of  justice  and  benevolence, 
set  forth  in  the  Pentateuch  with  regard  to  proselytes  .■*  All 
that  he  has  added  there  of  his  own  mind  is,  the  figurative 
paraphrase  of  Numb.  xxxv.  15,  and  the  interpretation,  pecu- 
liar to  himself  and  at  the  same  time,  we  own,  most  tolerant, 
of  the  first  part  of  v.  27  in  Ex.  xxii.,  namely,  that  the  former 
gods  of  the  proselytes  should  not  be  blasphemed  by  the 
Israelites.  As  to  his  Fragment  on  Exodus  xxii.  20,  it 
would  indeed,  were  it  genuine,  show  that  he  held  the  cir- 
cumcision of  a  proselyte  not  needful,  and  consequently 
justify  the  inference  that  he  regarded  such  a  new  convert 
as  equal  with  a  native  Israelite.  But  whoever  looks  closely 
at  this  piece  will  at  once  be  convinced  of  its  spuriousness. 
Philo  is  there,  in  commenting  on  said  verse,  alleged  to  have 
remarked  the  following  : 

"  He  shows  most  evidently  that  he  is  a  proselyte,  (and) 
not  one  circumcised  in  the  flesh  ••'  -  -  for  in  Egypt 
the  Hebrew  race  was  not  circumcised,  etc." 

Now  we  ask,  is  it  possible  to  suppose  that  Philo  exposed 
such  ignorance  as  to  state  the  Mosaic  type  of  a  proselyte 
to  be  invariably — for  this  import  his  assertion  has,  from 
the  antithesis  he  employs — uncircumcision  ?     Is  it    fair  to 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  II7 

think  him  unaware  of  Ex.  xii.  48  ?  Again,  can  he  have 
betrayed  .such  inacquaintance  with  Scripture  as  to  put  forth 
that  the  Hebrews  were  not  circumcised  in  Egypt .-'  Does 
not  Josh.  V.  5  attest  the  contrary  } 

These  objections  will  we  hope  convince  the  reader  that 
the  above  Fragment  is  inauthentic,  and  can  therefore  not 
be  brought  into  play  in  the  question  before  us. 

Moreover  and  mainly  we  object  concerning  this,  as  all 
the  other  attempts  to  make,  out  Philo  such  a  cosmopolitan 
religionist  as  to  have  dispensed  a  proselyte  who  had  only 
adopted  the  worship  of  the  true  God,  from  all  the  ritual 
observances  of  Mosaism,  that  in  the  above-cited  chapter  in 
'On  Curses,'  he  incontestably  shows  his  ground-sentiment 
in  our  problem  to  be,  that  the  proselyte  was  inferior  to  the 
born  Israelite.  Freely  dilating  on  Deut.  xxviii.  43,  in  which 
passage  the  proselyte  is  threatened  to  gain  more  and  more 
the  ascendancy  over  the  Israelite,  if  he  should  fall  away 
from  God  and  his  commands,  he  explains  as  follows  :  He 
who  has  "come  over  to  God  of  his  own  accord"  will  be  up, 
and  the  man  of  "noble  descent  who  has  adulterated  the 
coinage  of  his  noble  birth,  will  be  dragged  down  to  the 
lowest  depths." 

Here  he  has  not  only  reiterated  his  innermost  view  of 
Israel's  inherited  and  appointed  nobility  and  precedence 
above  other  nations,  he  has  also  most  directly  and  unmis- 
takably signified  his  other  perception  of  the  normal  super- 
iority of  the  born  Israelite  over  the  converted  heathen. 
This  condition  would,  he  reasons  in  accordance  with  the 
Scriptural  threat,  be  inverted,  however,  if  the  Israelite 
should  apostatize  from  his  faith. 

We  have  then  to  declare  positively  and  emphatically, 
that  Philo  can  by  no  means  be  accounted  as  putting  forth 
a  universalistic  doctrine  about  proselytes.  But  even  if  it 
could  really  be  proved  that  he  was  so  liberal  in  his  opinion 
as  Schuerer  imputes  to  him,  we  could  yet  not  attribute  with 
any  semblance  of  fairness  the  same  cosmopolitan  view  to 
the  generality  of  the  Hellenistic  Jews.  It  would  be  the 
height  of  frivolous  conjecture  to  assert,  that  they  were  in 
their  religious  practice  guided  by  the  abstract  speculations 
of  that  Pythagorean-Platonic  theosophist  and  allegorist  of 
Alexandria.  They  were,  we  aver,  on  the  contrary  as  strict 
in  their  position  regarding  the  admission  of  Gentiles  as  the 
Palestinian  Jews  were.  They  too  held  the  initiatory  rite 
with  the  body  of  the  Mosaic  precepts  as  incumbent  on  any 
Gentile  convert,  who  aspired  to  be  recognized  as  a  full 
member  of  the  Jewish  community. 


Il8  THE  SAHISATII   IN    IIISIORY. 

We  have  yet  to  continue  our  argument,  and  extend  it  to 
Jewish  Christianity.  VVe  will  subsequently  see  that  these 
sectaries,  too,  set  such  a  high  value  on  the  initiatory  rite, 
that  they  insisted  on  its  imposition  on  converts  to  their 
creed,  who  wished  to  be  on  a  par  of  immediate  spiritual 
fellowship  with  them.  That  none  of  the  primitive  apostles 
ever  thought  of  dispensing  formal  converts  to  the  Jewish 
Christian  body  from  it,  we  hold  to  be  a  positive  fact.  As 
to  the  four  well-known  decrees  set  forth  in  Acts  xv.,  we 
have  passed  on  them  at  another  point.  We  maintain  that, 
if  they  are  to  claim  any  genuineness  at  all,  it  consists  at 
most  in  their  being  ordained  for  half  proselytes  to  their 
creed,  just  as  the  true  Jews  had  their  own  so-called  seven 
Noachian  precepts  for  such  neophites.  But  that  any  of  the 
apostles  should  have  remitted  the  rite  of  initiation  to 
those  Gentiles  passing  over  to  the  Christian  community  as 
claimants  of  full  membership,  is  utterly  unhistorical.  Not 
in  a  council  meeting,  nor  even  by  private  transaction  —  as 
Baur  proposes  on  the  strength  of  Gal.  ii.,  after  positively 
rejecting  the  former  as  inauthentic — can  it  be  supposed 
that  either  Peter  or  James  should  have  approved  of  Paul's 
anti-covenant  mode  of  receiving  Gentile  converts.  We,  on 
our  part,  cannot  attribute  any  more  genuineness  to  Gal.  ii.  9, 
than  we  can  to  the  liberal  speeches  of  Peter  and  James  in 
Acts  XV.  The  complete  exchange  of  roles  in  this  tendency- 
work,  in  which  these  two  apostles  are  made  Paulinists,  is 
conceded  by  the  foremost  critics  of  our  day.  They  will 
surely  not  have  deviated  from  the  fixed  norm,  which  they 
had  doubtless  carried  over  to  their  new  relations  from 
their  former  unmixed  Judaism,  that  Gentile  converts  were 
to  attain  equality  with  born  Israelites  only  by  the  initiatory 
rite  and  the  acceptance  of  the  Mosaic  religion  (the 
latter  with  the  Jewish  Christians,  of  course,  minus  the 
sacrificial  precepts.) 

If  the  apostle  James,  the  head  of  the  Church,  deputed 
an  inquisitorial  party  to  investigate  Paul's  liberty  of  anti- 
Law  reception  of  converts  in  Antioch  (Gal.  ii.  12,  4),  he  will 
surely  not  have  yielded  to  Paul  afterwards,  and  sanctioned 
his  course.  Nor  could  Peter  who,  while  at  Antioch,  was 
"compelling  the  Gentiles  to  live  as  do  the  Jews"  (ib.  14), 
have  given  his  approbation  to  Paul's  proceedings,  as  it  is 
stated  there  (v.  9).  It  is  an  incontrovertible  fact  that  not 
only  in  the  primitive  Jewish  Christian  church,  but  among 
its  conservative  perpetuators,  the  Nazarenes,  as  well  as  the 
ascetic  sect,  the  Ebionites,  circumcision  was  the  indispensa- 
ble sacred  rite  of  initiation  into  Israel's  and  their  own 
communion.     It  were  not  only  "certain  of  the  sect  of  the 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  1 IQ 

Pharisees  who  believed"  that  insisted  on  the  complete 
Judaizing  of  Christian  converts,  if  they  wished  to  be 
thoroughly  united  with  them,  as  the  Pauline  author  of  Acts 
(xv.  5)  represents,  but  all  the  Jewish  Christians  together 
with  their  leaders  did  so,  as  it  is  evident  from  Acts  xxi.  20- 
22  itself,  and  in  especial  from  Paul's,  own  Epistle  to  the 
Galatians  (ch.  ii ).  And  it  were  not  only  all  the  Jerusa- 
lemite  Jewish  Christians  who  were  indignant  at  Paul's 
"  liberty,"  that  is,  the  Jewish  lawlessness  he  preached 
everywhere,  but  also  those  of  the  cities  of  Asia  Minor  and 
other  Grecian  communities  where  he  held  forth  as  mission- 
ary, although  the  tendency-writer  of  that  work  makes  out 
solely  the  Jeivs  of  those  communities  as  having  been  his 
opponents  (xx.  3,  19).  The  Hellenistic  Jewish  Christians, 
all  of  them,  that  is,  who  remained  in  sympathy  with  the 
mother-church — and  their  number  was  doubtless  much 
larger  than  that  of  the  Paulinists  of  Jewish  descent — will 
have  continued  to  insist  on  the  complete  conversion  of 
Gentiles,  with  the  initiatory  rite,  as  they  persevered  in  the 
strict  observance  of  the  latter  for  themselves. 

That  they  should  with  Paul's  anti-covenant  propagandism 
have  gradually  left  off  circumcision  among  themselves,  as 
Baur  ('Paul,'  and  '  History  of  the  Church,'  etc.,  p.  lOi)  pro- 
posed, lacks  every  historical  warrant.  The  contempt  of  cir- 
cumcision in  Ep.  Barn,  and  Ep.  of  Ignatius  proves  nothing, 
for  both  writers  were  Gentile  Christians.  And  as  to  his 
other  argument  from  the  Clementine  Homilies,  there  can 
be  deduced  from  this  work  neither  an  evidence  of  the 
leaving  off  of  the  rite  by  the  Jewish  Christian  sect  of  the 
Ebionites,  nor  of  their  renunciation  of  it  for  Gentile  con- 
verts. Baur  argues  from  the  circumstance  that  there  is  not 
the  least  question  of  circumcision  in  the  Homilies.  But 
since  he  has  to  concede  himself  that  in  the  Contestatio, 
attached  to  the  Homilies,  there  is  a  trace  of  circumcision 
being  held*  indispensable  by  the  then  Ebionites,  its  author's 
silence  about  it  cannot  carry  much  weight.  When  we 
further  consider  that,  according  to  the  most  reliable 
testimony  of  P^piphanius,  the  Ebionites  held  yet  in  his  own 
time  the  rite  of  circumcision  as  all-important — as  we  will 
exhibit  hereafter — the  non-mention  of  it  in  the  Homilies 
can  certainly  not  be  accounted  for  by  the  unconcern  enter- 
tained for  it  by  their  Ebionite  author.  The  omission  of 
circumcision  in  this  pseudo-Clementine  work  can,  we  hold, 
be  accounted  for,  without  "having  recourse  to  Baur's  forced 
theory. 


120  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

First  of  all  we  have  to  bear  in  mind  the  exalted  percep- 
tion which  the  F^bionites,  as  Essenic  or  Essene-like 
Christians,  had  of  baptisms.  To  the  Essenes  their  own 
lustrations  were  preferable  to  sacrifices  (Ant.  xviii.  I,  5), 
and  the  purifications  together  with  the  common  meals  had 
to  them  supplanted  the  need  of  the  sacrificial  ritual  of  the 
Temple.  The  same  superior  estimate  of  baptism  we  meet 
with  in  John  the  Baptist.  It  had  to  him  doubtless  a 
"mysteriously  purifying  and  absolving  power"  (Strauss, 
New  Life  of  Jesus,  i.  p.'  254).  To  John  is  in  the  pseudo- 
Clementine  Recognitions  attributed  the  institution  of 
baptism  instead  of  the  sacrifices  (see  Hilgenfeld,  'Judaism 
and  Jewish  Christianity,'  p.  49).  The  sentiment  that 
baptism  for  the  remission  of  sins  supplied  the  place  of 
sacrifice,  which  latter  was  to  be  repudiated,  is  also  expressed 
by  the  Essenic  or  Baptist  author  of  the  fourth  book  of  the 
Sibylline  Oracles  (Hilgenfeld,  1.  c.  p.  33). 

The  attribution  then  of  such  an  invaluable  merit  to 
baptism  as  a  ceremonial  medium  of  atonement  b}^  the 
ascetic  Jewish  and  Messianic  sects  more  or  less  related  to 
the  Essenic  stock,  renders  it  quite  conceivable  that  the 
Ebionite  Clementine  author,  too,  should  have  assigned  an 
exceeding  merit  to  and  laid  particular  and  inte:!se  stress  on 
baptism  for  the  admission  of  converts  from  paganism  to 
the  Ebionite  Jewish  Christianity;  see  Horn.  xiii.  9.  But  as 
little  as  the  Essenes  and  John  the  Baptist  and  his  adherents 
wished  by  their  ablutions  to  disparage  circumcision  as  the 
Jewish  initiatory  rite,  and,  further,  as  little  as  the  Ebionites 
of  the  two  centuries  consecutive  on  the  time  of  the  com- 
position of  the  Clementine  writings,  ever  thought  of 
neglecting  the  rite  of  circumcision  —  as  will  later  be  found 
indisputaj^ly  attested — ,  though  they  continued  to  value 
the  baptisms  highly,  so  little  must  we  with  Baur  assume, 
that  the  Ebionite  author  of  the  Clementine  Homilies 
intended  a  disregard  for  it,  because  he  made  no'mention  of 
it  in  the  body  of  his  work.  (The  words  "  etiamsi  non  sit 
circumcisus"  in  the  Clementine  Recognitions,  v.  36,  which 
work  we  possess  only  in  the  Latin  garb,  have  doubtless 
been  added  by  a  later  reviser,  since  they  do  not  appear  in 
the  similar  sentence  of  the  Homilies,  which  is,  besides, 
essentially  different  in  its  tenor  from  that  of  the  Recog- 
nitions ;  see  Hilgenf.  1.  c.  p.  102). 

Secondly,  may  the  silence  of  the  author  of  the  Homilies 
be  accounted  for  by  the  notorious  fact,  that  in  his  time 
there  rested  a  dire  necessity  on  Jews  and  certainly  also  on 
Jewish    Christians,    of   keeping    conversions    of    Gentiles 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  121 

attended  by  circumcision,  if  any  such  could  be  attempted 
at  all,  secret,  for  the  edict  published  by  the  emperor 
Antoninus  Pius,  which  strictly  interdicted  its  performance 
on  non-Jews,  though  it  repealed  Hadrian's  prohibition  of  it 
for  the  Jews  themselves  ;  see  Muenter.  1.  c.  p  99,  and 
Friedlaender,  1.  c. 

While  we  provisionally  do  not  agree  with  the  latter 
author — the  relative  paragraphs  of  the  imperial  Roman 
law-compends  are  not  presently  accessible  to  the  writer  in 
their  original  complete  form,  and  he  has  to  depend  on  the 
abrupt  quotations  in  modern  works — that  since  the 
publication  of  that  edict  formal  transitions  to  Judaism 
ceased  entirely,  and  converts  thence  joined  to  the  Jews 
could  only  have  been  of  the  class  of  the  '  proselytes  of  the 
gate,'  that  is,  half-proselytes,  we  yet  hold  it  quite  conceivable 
that  the  existence  of  the  edict  alone,  though  it  was  not 
penally  enacted  or,  if  so,  not  penally  enforced  till  Severus' 
time  —  the  first  third  of  the  third  century  C.  E. —  should 
have  determined  a  writer,  especially  one  living  in  the 
capital  of  the  Empire,  such  as  the  author  of  the  Homilies 
supposably  was,  to  pass  circumcision  by  in  silence. 

To  what  end.  we  ask,  should  he  have  mentioned  it,  if  it 
was  then,  for  its  imperial  prohibition,  not  feasible  for 
converts  from  paganism,  or  if  its  performance  on  them  was 
at  any  rate  fraught  with  some  danger  to  those  executing  or 
encouraging  it,  though  perhaps  not  subject  to  prompt, 
judicial  punishment  .'* 

As  to  this,  we  would  propose  —  whilst  we,  for  the  cause 
stated  before,  declare  ourselves  open  to  correction  —  that 
Antoninus  Pius  merely  enacted  the  prohibition  of  the 
circumcision  of  non-Jews,  without  at  the  same  time  making 
it  a  punishable  offence.  We  presume  this  from  the  fact 
that  it  was  apparently  the  emperor  Alexander  Severus  who 
first  "forbade  Gentiles  to  turn  Jews  under  grave  penalty'* 
(Vita  17,  cited  by  Mommsen,  as  above).  Up  to  this 
emperor's  time  the  prohibition  of  Antoninus  may  have 
merely  lingered  on  in  the  letter,  without  that  penalties 
were  awarded  against  offenders.  The  Jews  and,  for  aught 
we  can  reasonably  infer  from  Justin's  Dialogue  with  Trypho> 
ch.  xlvii.,  the  Jewish  Christians  also  (those  whom  Justin 
proposes  as  not  inducing  or  coercing  other  (Gentile) 
Christians  to  observe  circumcision,  etc.,  were  doubtless  the 
Jewish  Paulinists),  may  in  such  condition  of  abeyance  and 
suspense  have,  from  the  exceeding  awe  of  the  sacred  rite, 
continued  to  perform    it  clandestinely,  and   with  the  same 


122  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

caution  the  Talmud  relates  of  the  period  of  Hadrian's  pro- 
scription, on  proselytes.  Yet  such  attempts  were  supposably 
rare,  for  the  fear  of  imperial  intervention  must  have 
weighed  heavily  even  with  enthusiastic  proselytizers. 

From  Severus'  time  onwards,  when  severe  penalties  had 
been  denounced  against  such  offenders,  we  own  that  formal 
conversions  to  Judaism  or  Jewish  Cnristianity  were  decid- 
edly at  an  end.  That  his  penal  injunction  was  rigidly  exe- 
cuted, even  under  his  several  successors,  appears  from 
Origen's  statement  in  his  treatise  'Against  Celsus.'  which 
was  written  about  250  C.  E.  In  it  he  mentions  that  the 
Sicarians — a  nickname  which  the  Romans  had  then,  perhaps 
already  since  Hadrian's  time,  given  to  every  circumcised 
person,  the  same  that  they  had,  two  hundred  years,  before, 
used  in  speaking  of  the  wild  faction  of  the  zealots — were  on 
the  mere  evidence  of  the  rite  being  performed  on  them  put 
to  death.  This  he  testifies  of  his  own  time.  The  Samari- 
tans Vvith  whom  the  rite  was  also  held  indispensable  as  the 
initiatory  one  of  their  nation,  were  then  the  chief  sufferers, 
the  Jews  alone  having  enjoyed  the  liberty  of  practising  it 
among  themselves. 

On  the  whole,  it  may  be  safe  to  assume,  that  formal  con- 
versions to  Judaism  or  the  apostolic  and  Ebionite  Jewish 
Christianity,  were  rare  already  from  Hadrian's  proscription 
forth.  The  Jews  will  consequently  from  the  latter  period 
onwards  have  shown  little  zeal  for  gaining  additions  to 
their  fold  from  paganism,  since  the  prospect  of  the  final 
initiation  of  the  converts  was  so  dim  and  uncertain.  With 
the  Jewish  Christians  it  will  have  been  about  the  same. 
For  we  cannot,  as  far  as  the  Ebionites  are  concerned — - 
and  the  Nazarenes  were  surely  as  strict,  if  not  stricter  than 
they,  with  regard  to  Israel's  covenant-rite — accept  for  one 
instant  the  theory  that,  because  they  prized  baptism  so 
highly,  even  for  the  renunciation  of  paganism,  they  will 
have  remitted  it  to  new  converts  to  their  faith  and  received 
them  as  full  members  without  its  performance,  even  during 
the  period  that  an  imperial  injunction  was  laid  upon  it.  It 
is  impossible  to  the  true  historian  to  coincide  in  such  a 
theory.  For  the  Ebionites  did  not  only  hold  the  pagans 
as  impure  and  defiling  by  touch,  which-  trait  Epiphanius 
relates  of  them  in  especial  (Haer.  xxx.  2,  in  Hiigenfe'd, 
'Hist,  of  the  Her.  of  Prim.  Christ.'  p.  430),  and  on  account 
of  which  they  will  surely  have  eschewed  all  associations 
with  the  uncircumcised  nf  pagan  descent,  might  they  even 
have  outwardly  joined  in  the  profession  of  their  own  creed, 
not  to  say  that  they  will  not  have  accorded  to  the  latter  a 
complete    religious    union     with    themselves.        We    have, 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HITSORY.  1 23 

besides,,  the  most  authentic  testimony  of  the  paramount 
import  ascribed  by  that  sect  to  the  rite  of  circumcision, 
which  decisively  precludes  the  idea  that  they  should,  even 
during  the  pressure  of  its  imperial  prohibition  for  Gentiles, 
have  passively  connived  at  its  omission  and  admitted  bap- 
tized converts  to  their  church  as  members  equal  with 
themselves. 

Epiphanius  ( Haer.  xxx.  26,  in  Hilgenfeld,  1.  c.)  repre- 
sents them  as  "  boasting  of  circumcision  as  being  the  seal 
and  stamp  of  the  patriarchs  and  the  righteous,  who  had 
lived  according  to  the  Law,  by  which  they  ( the  Ebionites  ) 
believe  to  become  like  unto  them  ;"  also  as  referring  the 
rite  to  Jesus  and  putting  forth  the  argument  (proverbially), 
'  Christ  was  circumcised,  so  must  thou  be  circumcised.' 

Is  it  then  thinkable  that  a  sect  attributing  such  sacred 
religious-national  import  to  circumcision,  will  at  any  time 
have  left  it  off  either  for  themselves  or  for  converts  to  their 
new  faith,  as  long  as  they  could  exact  it  from  them  without 
peril  to  themselves  ;  or  that  they,  in  the  epoch  of  great 
peril  for  attempts  of  formal  conversions,  recognized  uncir- 
cumcised,  though  baptized,  new  converts  as  their  peers  and 
united  with  them  on  equal  terms  of  Jewish  and  Christian 
fellowship  .-*     Nevermore. 

We  can  accede  to  such  supposition  the  less,  when  we 
consider  that  there  is  unimpeachable  testimony,  that  alike 
the  Ebionites  and  Nazarcnes  continued  to  impose  Mosaism 
on  Gentile  converts  to  their  faith,  at  least  till  towards  the 
end  of  the  fourth  century.  Can  it  then  be  imagined  that 
they  were  at  any  time  remiss  in  urging  on  them  circum- 
cision, its  chief  rite.-* 

Of  the  Mosaic-Jewish  character  of  almost  the  entire 
Christian  church  up  to  Hadrian's  persecution  even  the 
Gentile  Christian^  writer  Sulpicius  Severus  bears  witness 
(Hist.  sacr.  ii.  31).  Likewise  asserts  the  tolerant  Jewish 
Christian  annalist  Hegesippus,  flourishing  in  the  earlier 
part  of  the  second  half  of  the  second  century,  that  he  found 
everywhere,  in  Greece  and  in  Rome,  the  "  right  doctrine  as 
the  Law  and  the  prophets  and  the  Lord  proclaim,"  which  is 
conclusive  proof  that  anti-covenant  and  anti-Law  Paulinism 
was  then  not  the  rule,  but  the  exception,  even  among 
foreign  and  Hellenistic  Jewish  Christians. 

The  predominance  of  Mosaism  with  Jewish  Christians, 
and  the  imposition  by  them  of  circumcision.  Sabbath  and 
other  Jewish  rites  on  Gentile  Christians  in  the  reign  of 
Marcus  Aurelius,  is  attested  by  the  discussion  in  the 
before-quoted  chapter  xlvii.  of  Justin's  Dialogue.  It  is 
true,  he   makes  there  a  division  between  such  Jewish  pro- 

(9) 


124  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

fessors  of  Christianity,  who  would  insist  on  the  acceptance 
of  the  Mosaic  religious  observances  by  new  Gentile  con- 
verts, without  which  they  refused  to  hold  communion  with 
them,  and  others  who  would  be  indulgent  enough  not  to 
refuse  to  live  together  with  them  unless  they  adopted  the 
Jewish  rites.  And  it  is  sufficiently  clear,  too,  that,  although 
he  discusses  the  subject  in  the  form  of  a  proposition  only, 
he  had  reference  in  his  mind  to  the  two  ways  as  factually 
co-existing  in  his  own  days.  Yet,  we  cannot,  from  the 
other  testimonies  we  possess  of  the  continued  imposition 
of  Mosaism  at  least  to  the  latter  part  of  the  fourth  century, 
but  suppose,  as  already  indicated  above,  that  the  tolerant 
Jewish  Christians,  whom  he  suggests  as  freely  communing 
with  inobservant  brethren  in  the  new  faith,  were  none 
others  than  Paulinists  ;  and  these  were  but  few. 

To  about  the  same  period  as  Justin's  writings,  belong  the 
complaints  in  the  polemical  Epistles  of  pseudo-Ignatius 
about  the  observance  of  the  Mosaic  Law  among  Gentile 
Christians  (  see  Hilgenfeld,  'Jud.  and  Jewish  Christ.'  p.  40). 

And  that  the  imposition  of  the  Mosaic  religion  —  minus 
the  recognition  of  the  sacrificial  ritual,  of  course  —  on 
Christian  converts  by  both  the  Jewish  sects  of  the  Naza- 
renes  and  Ebionites,  whatever  caution  with  regard  to  the 
initiatory  rite  they  had  to  observe  since  the  publication  of 
Antoninus  Pius'  edict,  and  notwithstanding  they  had  to 
desist  openly  from  formally  exacting  the  rite  at  least  since 
Severus'  rigid  decision,  had  nevertheless  not  ceased  as  late 
as  the  latter  part  of  the  fourth  century,  we  can  derive  from 
the  following  accounts  of  Jerome  and  his  contemporary, 
Augustine. 

Of  the  Ebionites  Jerome  asserts  (in  Isa.  i.  12,  in  Hilgen- 
feld, '  History  of  the  Her.,  etc.,'  p.  441  ),  that  they  declare 
the  Mosaic  Law  obligatory  upon  all,  even  the  Gentile 
Christians  ;  and  of  the  "allies"  of  the  Ebionites,  that  they 
decide  that  only  the  Jews  and  those  of  Jewish  origin  have 
to  observe  it. 

Who  these  allies  were,  is  debatable.  Hilgenfeld  ib.  p. 
442.  admits  the  possibility  of  the  Nazarenes  being  under- 
stood by  them.  He  yet  remarks  at  the  same  time,  that 
even  in  this  case  "it  is  not  provable  that  they  should  have 
dispensed  the  Gentile  Christians  from  the  observance  of  the 
Law  generally,  and  already  long  before  Jerome's  time." 
For  even  Augustine  bears  yet  witness,  he  argues  further,  of 
the  Nazarenes  of  his  time,  that  they  "  were  compelling  the 
Gentiles  to  Judaize"  (in  his  treatise  against  Faustus,  the 
Manichaean  ).  This  treatise  was  written  about  400  of  our 
era.     And  if  Augustine  adds  there,  that  the  Jewish  Chris- 


THE  SABBATH  IN   HISTORY.  1 2$ 

tians  who  force  Gentiles  to  Judaize  are  "  those  whom 
Faustus  mentions  under  the  name  of  Symmachians  or 
Nazarenes,  who  endure  to  our  own  times,"  we  have  a  suffi- 
cient testimony  for  those  latter  days  of  Jewish  Christianity, 
as  to  its  vigorous  insistance  on  the  Mosaically  regulated 
life  of  the  new  converts,  who  wished  to  be  at  one  with 
it.  It  is  immaterial  in  our  argument,  whether  Augus- 
tine employed  the  title  Nazarenes  as  indiscriminately,  as 
did  Faustus  himself,  namely,  with  the  inclusion  of  the 
Ebionites.  In  any  case  we  gain  from  his  statement  the 
evidence,  that  the  Nazarenes  were  yet  in  his  days,  as  it  was 
done  by  the  Jerusalemite  apostles  in  those  of  Paul,  compel- 
ling the  Gentile  converts  to  adopt  the  Jewish  religious  rites. 
If  he  included  the  Ebionites,  we  would  by  it  have  a  cor- 
roboration of  Jerome's  assertion  as  to  the  same  course 
being  pursued  by  this  sect. 

We  will  not  any  further  enlarge  on  this  and  correlated 
points,  most  important  as  they  are,  for  fear  of  wearying  the 
reader.  To  sum  up,  we  may  state  it  as  thus  far  sufficiently 
evidenced,  that  the  generality  of  the  Jewish  Christians, 
whether  of  Palestine  or  any  other  country  of  the  Roman 
empire  — the  Paulinists  surely  excepted  —  would  at  no  time 
practically  depart  from  the  initiatory  rite  for  themselves,  nor 
assume  the  authority  of  dispensing  Gentile  converts  from 
it  for  a  complete  union  with  themselves.  If  they  continued 
to  impose  Mosaism  on  them  till  the  end  of  the  fourth  century, 
as  we  elicited  in  the  foregoing,  they  can  certainly  not  be 
thought  as  dropping  its  chief  rite,  which  they  so  profoundly 
revered,  for  the  sake  of  winning  Gentiles  over  the  more 
quickly  and  promptly,  and  as  being  satisfied  with  baptizing 
them,  in  the  "  conviction  that  they  could  never  be  won  over 
by  any  other  means,"  as  Baur  argues.  No,  neither  the 
Ebionites  and  Nazarenes  of  Palestine,  nor  any  of  the 
Hellenistic  Jewish  Christians,  except  the  followers  of  Paul, 
would  for  any  cause  surrender  the  religious  bulwark  of  the 
Jewish  religious  nationality,  the  initiatory  rite,  nor  depart 
from  the  inviolable  norm,  that  it  be  the  indispensable  con- 
dition for  a  complete  union  of  Gentiles  with  the  Jewish 
nation. 

How  they  put  themselves  right  with  it  in'  the  period  of 
its  imperial  interdiction,  with  or  without  annexed  penalty, 
we  can  indeed  not  definitely  ascertain.  Yet  we  meet 
everywhere  with  the  surest  indications  that  they  have  at 
no  time  disregarded  it,  even  for  the  converts  from  paganism. 

And  reverting  to  the  initial  point  of  the  present 
discussion  we  reiterate,  that  the  initiatory  rite  was  in  the 
Greco-Roman  world  continuously  regarded  as  the  indispen- 


126  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

sable  mark  of  the  Jewish  religious  nationality,  by  the  pagan 
writers,  as  well  as  by  the  Jews  and  all  the  Jewish  Christians, 
except  the  small  number  following  Paul  or  his  teaching. 

-■^  Religion  is  in  Cicero,  De  Nat.  Deor.  p.  44,  defined  as 
"the  cult  of  the  country  gods." 

2^  Sat.  xiv.  103.  In  the  sixth  satire,  v.  544,  he  speaks  of 
the  Jewish  laws  as  the  "  Solyman  laws,"  alluding  perhaps  to 
Jerusalem  as  the  center  of  Jewish  legislation.  Or  he  may 
have  had  in  mind  the  fables  as  to  the  name  of  Jerusalem, 
which  Tacitus  mentions  (Hist.  v.  2).  The  latter  reproduces 
there  two  opinions,  one  according  to  which  Hierosolymus 
was  one  of  the  two  leaders  of  the  Jews  from  Egypt,  and 
another,  that  Jerusalem  received  the  name  Hierosolyma 
from  the  Solymi  of  Homer. 

^^From  the  fact,  however,  that  the  account  of  Sifre 
quoted  in  our  text,  names  Usha  in  Galilee  as  the  place  of 
the  Jewish  Senate  to  which  the  ambassadors  were  dispatched, 
we  had  better  suppose  that  the  affair  happened  in  the  first 
years  of  the  accession  of  Hadrian,  who  was  otherwise  a 
very  inquisitive  —  scoffer.  For  it  does  not  seem  that  the 
removal  of  the  Senate  to  that  town  took  place  earlier  than 
towards  the  end  of  Trajan's  reign,  when  it  was  perhaps 
necessitated  through  the  destruction  of  Jamnia  by  Quietus 
(see  on  this,  Gastfreund,  Biography  of  R.  Akiba,  p.  20). 

With  no  less  propriety  the  Rabbinical  account  of  the 
imperial  scrutiny  could  be  taken  as  referring  to  the 
government  of  Caligula,  whose  curiosity  about  Judaism  the 
reader  will  find  well  attested  in  the  present  work. 

^*  Sifre  (1.  c.)  imputes  to  the  emperor  the  crafty  device 
and  request  to  the  ambassadors,  that  they  should  first 
become  proselytes  —  to  gain,  presumably,  free  access  to 
the  central  seat  of  Jewish  learning,  and  have  ample 
opportunity  of  listening  to  the  unreserved  discussions  of 
points  of  Law,  and  catching  their  freely  disclosed  inward- 
ness, without  that  they  would  in  the  least  arouse  the 
suspicion,  that  their  attendance  was  inspired  by  anything 
but  a  devout  eagerness  to  enlarge  their  store  of  knowledge 
of  the  authoritative  interpretation  of  the  sacred  Law  by 
the  lore  of  the  Jewish  sages. 

^''Comp.  Strabo  xvi.  2,  in  Hausrath  1.  c.  i.  178:  "The 
Jews  designate  as  God  what  we  call  heaven  and  the  universe 
and  the  nature  of  things."  Juvenal  may  ha^e  gleaned  his 
information  from  him.  But  was  not  Jupiter  himself  the 
sky  ?  Ennius  at  least  represents  him  so  :  "  Aspice  hoc 
sublimen  candens  quem  invocant  omnes  Jovem  "  (cited  by 
Cicero,  De  Nat.  Deor.  ii.  2). 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  12/ 

Juvenal's  misrepresentation  was  possibly  original  and 
due  to  the  notice  which  could  broadly  be  made  by  all  the 
pagans,  that  the 'Jews  observed  and  distinguished  by  some 
solemnity  the  appearance  of  the  new  moon  for  the  festivals 
of  their  calendar.  An  analogous  instance  may  be  adduced 
from  a  passage  of  a  Christian  Gnostic  work,  '  The  Preaching 
of  Peter,'  quoted  in  the  Stromata  of  Clement  of  Alexandria 
(vi.),  in  which  the  author  admonishes  his  brethren  to 
worship  God  "  not  Jis  the  Greeks,  nor  as  the  Jews  do,  the 
latter  of  whom,  believing  to  be  the  only  ones  who  know 
God,  are  not  aware  that  they  worship  angels  and  arch- 
angels, the  month  and  the  moon  ;  and  unless  the  moon  has 
.  appeared  they  do  not  celebrate  the  Sabbath  which  is 
called  the  first  (Rosh  Hashanah  .-*),  nor  the  New  Moon,  nor 
Passover,  nor  the  feast  of  Passover  ('heorten;'  cp.  Matt. 
XXV.  5).  nor  the  Great  Day"  (Day  of  Atonement).  Celsus, 
flourishing  in  Marcus  Aurelius'  time,  also  reproaches,  in  his 
'True  Account,'  the  Jews  with  worshiping  the  heaven  and 
the  angels  who  dwell  therein.  (Origines,  Contra  Celsum, 
V.  6).  Origen  repels  the  reoroach,  and  nobly  defends  the 
Jews  who.  he  protests,  being  expressly  prohibited  to  bow 
down  to  the  sun.  moon  and  stars,  and  truly  fearing  this 
awful  injunction,  can  surely  not  be  supposed  to  worship  the 
heaven  and  the  angels.  This  custom  would  be  in  violation 
of  Judaism. 

^^  Hausrath,  1.  c.  i.  178,  remarks:  "To  worship  an 
invisible  Being  seemed  to  the  Romans  a  monstrous  super- 
stition and  unheard-of  credulity.  *  *  -^  Xhe  Jews  who 
had  dedicated  their  whole  life  to  the  service  of  their  faith 
as  none  other  had  done,  seemed  to  the  Romans  to  be 
without  any  religion  at  all,  because  it  presented  no  points 
of  analogy  with  the  religions  of  the  Gentiles.  It  was 
possible  to  endure  other  gods,  indeed,  but  the  disdaining  of 
all  gods  seemed  unendurable." 

^^That  Roman  writers  knew  that  the  Jews  observed 
more  fasts  than  just  that  of  Atonement  day,  is  evident  from 
Tacitus,  Hist  v.  4,  who  speaks  of  "  frequent  fasts  "  of  the 
Jews.  Among  them  he  may  have  also  adverted  in  his 
thought  to  the  Jewish  private  fasts  for  disquieting  dreams. 
Rabbinical  Judaism  had  indeed  assigned  to  them  a  high 
rank,  in  the  belief  that  they  were  a  religious  means,  by 
which  the  ill  omens  they  might  chance  to  betoken,  could 
most  effectually  be  warded  off.  They  were  held  so 
important,  that  one  of  the  ancient  theologians  is  reported 
to  have  proposed  that  they  might  be  kept  even  on  the 
Sabbath. 


f28  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

This  kind  of  fasts  had  perhaps  in  particular  elicited  the 
attention  of  the  Romans,  who  were  so  much  concerned 
about  the  ominous  presages  of  dreams.*  The  wisest  of 
them  connected  them  with  the  Providence  of  their  deities 
(see  Friedlaender,  as  above,  p.  532,  sq.). 

^^The  reader  will  we  hope  not  deem  it  amiss  if  we  insert 
in  this  place  some  sentiments  on  the  Sabbath,  the  Jewish 
customs  in  general,  and  the  Jews  as  a  nation,  so  very  con- 
genial to  those  of  Seneca,  though  they  were  uttered  several 
centuries  later.  Rutilius,  a  high-bred  Roman  of  the  fifth 
century,  originally  coming  from  Gaul,  who  made  a  voyage 
to  his  native  country  in  the  year  418,  has  left  behind  an 
'  Itinerarium.'  from  which  Lardner  (Works,  vol.  viii.  pp.  89- 
90)  reproduces  the  following  as  to  his  Jewish  experience. 
At  the  port  of  Faleria  he  went  ashore.  At  the  station  he 
found  the  Gentile  people  celebrating  the  feast  of  Osiris.  Ill 
luck  threw  him  on  the  mercy  of  a  Jew  who  had  farmed  the 
revenues  of  the  port,  and  was  at  the  same  time  keeping  an 
inn  or  hotel.  In  it  he  stopped.  Doubly  unfortunately  for 
him  it  happened,  that  he  had  to  endure  the  discomforts 
which  the  Jewish  Sabbath  entailed.  And  what  was  still 
worse,  his  fare  consisted  of  "  mashed  shrubs  and  beaten 
sea-weed," — a  most  frugal  one  indeed.  In  a  furious  tone 
he  therefore  breaks  forth  against  the  Jews,  exclaiming : 
"We  despise  by  right  the  filthy  nation  that,  itself  shame- 
less, observes  circumcision.  The  root  of  folly  it  is,  however, 
that  to  them  cold  Sabbaths  are  of  great  concern  ;  but  their 
heart  is  still  colder  than  their  religion.  Every  seventh  day 
is  (with  them)  devoted  to  base  inactivity — a  weak  image, 
so  to  speak,  of  a  weary  God  -''  ""  ""  ""  Oh,  that  Judea 
had  never  been  subdued,  in  the  wars  of  Pompey  and 
under  the  command  of  Titus  !  The  contagion  of  that 
exterminated  (? )  pestilence  is  spreading  wider  and  wider. 
The  conquered  nation  is  oppressing  its  victors." 

Have  we  not  in  this  last  sentence  a  close  resemblance  to 
Seneca's  lament  over  the  wide-spreading  influence  of 
Judaism  .''  Rutilius  yet  differs  from  him  so  far  that  he 
does  not  reflect  on  the  Jewish  proselytism  proper,  but 
rather  on  the  spread  of  the  Jewish  people  all  over  the 
Roman  empire,  and  their  acquisition  of  important  official 
and  social  positions,  by  which  he  exaggeratingly  charges 
they  were  making  the  Gentile  society  dependent  on  them- 
selves. This  gave  him  deep  chagrin.  The  more  so, 
because  he  was  himself  a  sufferer  from  Jewish  "oppression," 
on  the  Sabbath  of  his  host.  That  he  decries  the  Sabbath 
observance  of  the  Jews  as  the  root  of  folly,  is  partly 
accounted  for   by  the  sour  temper  which  this  same  experi- 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  I29 

ence  had  occasioned  in  him.  In  the  main  he  has,  in  the 
condemnation  of  the  Sabbath  for  the  inactivity  of  its 
observers,  fallen  in  with  Seneca,  Juvenal  and  Tacitus. 
New  he  is  only  in  his  blasphemous  sarcasm,  that  the 
Sabbath  was  "  much  like  a  weak  image  of  a  weary  God," 
insinuating  thereby  without  doubt,  that  the  Sabbath  with 
its  lack  of  manifest  energy  appeared  as  the  type  of  an 
exhausted  or  powerless  God,  and  that  the  Jews  worshiped 
such  a  one. 

^^  That  Juvenal  was,  for  all  the  slight  with  which  he 
treats  the  Sabbath  and  other  Jewish  ceremonies,  by  far  not 
such  a  vehement  antagonist  of  the  Jews  as  Tacitus,  we 
have  already  noted  above.  The  latter  was  the  veritable 
Stcecker  of  his  generation.  His  attacks  were  direct  bolts 
of  malice  and  hate.  Juvenal,  however,  exposed  the  Jewish 
customs  more  in  the  form  and  tone  of  an  indirect  criticism. 
He  wished  to  set  forth,  in  his  14th  satire,  the  perverse 
parental  influence  on  the  Roman  youth.  The  Jewish  mode 
of  life  of  converted  Roman  parents,  which  he  held  so  sub- 
versive of  the  true  Roman  virtues,  offered  itself  to  him  as  a 
fit  object  for  such  illustration.  A.s  to  his  contempt  for  the 
Jewish  nation,  it  surely  was  not  so  deep  and  bitter  as  that 
which  he  cherished  against  the  Greeks — a  circumstance 
already  empliasized  above  with  regard  to  Cicero's  onset 
against  the  Jews. 

Greeks,  Syrians  and  other  oriental  people  with  whom 
Rome  seems  to  have  been  flooded  in  Juvenal's  time,  were, 
from  the  language  he  puts  in  his  friend  Umbricius'  mouth, 
hated  much  more  than  the  Jews,  not  only  by  him,  but  most 
likely  by  many  other  Roman  men  of  letters  and  common 
citizens.  Against  the  Greeks  he  was  put  out  most.  They, 
though  the  fewest  of  the  "dregs"  of  society,  as  the  satirist 
styles  those  aliens,  had  yet  through  their  "quick  compre- 
hension, desperate  impudence,  and  ever  ready  and  most 
impetuous  talk,"  succeeded  in  insinuating  themselves  into 
the  noble  and  rich  families  of  Rome,  and  became  their 
actual  "  souls  and  rulers.''  That  the  "hungry  little  Grecians" 
should  by  their  bland  and  cunning  ways  acquire  the  best 
houses  and  crowd  out  the  better  citizens,  whose  "  infancy 
had  breathed  the  air  of  the  Aventine,"  offended  him,  as 
doubtless  many  other  natives,  much  more  sensitively,  than 
did  the  occasional  sight  of  some  poor  Jews,  we  may  set  down 
as  certain.  And  it  were  these  exclusively,  it  seems,  whom 
he  at  times  encountered,  or  at  least  had  in  mind,  in  writing 
the  passages  of  those  satires,  which  we  will  note  farther 
on.  The  thrifty  and  wealthy  of  them — and  it  will  from  one 
of  our  above  discussions  appear  as  very   probable,  that  a 


130  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

good  number  of  this  class  existed  in  Rome  and  belonged 
to  a  long  settled  colony  of  the  times  anterior  to  Pompey's 
conquest  of  Judea — he  seems  not  to  have  known  or  cared 
to  notice. 

In  attempting  to  show,  that  Juvenal  had  not  despised  the 
Jews  in  the  same  degree  he  did  the  Greeks,  we  must  not 
be  understood  as  intending  to  palliate  the  odiousness  of 
his  reviling  remarks  on  the  former,  which  we  meet  in  his 
fourteenth  satire.  For  we  are  well  aware  from  other  of  his 
compositions,  that  he  cherished  the  most  decided  disregard 
to  the  Jews.  His  intolerant  gibe  of  those  wretched  Jews 
whose  only  property  was,  to  use  his  own  phrase,  "a  basket 
and  hay"  (Sat.  iii.  14;  vi.  542),  proves  sufficiently  how 
bigoted  he  was.  He  could  not  brook  to  see  even  the  pauper 
Jews,  forsaken  creatures  as  they  were,  because  homeless 
and  exiled  through  the  late  national  catastrophe,  and  per- 
haps before  doomed  to  slavery  and  but  recently  emanci- 
pated, enjoy  the  scanty  shelter  and  wretched  accommoda- 
tions, which  they  found  in  a  grove  in  the  eastern  outskirts 
of  the  city,  formerly  consecrated  to  the  nimph  Egeria,  but 
now  let  out  to  them  at  a  fixed  rent.  Here  those  destitute 
Jews,  possibly  because  they  had  not  found  room  enough  in 
the  established  quarter  of  their  brethren  beyond  the  Tiber, 
were  encamped,  putting  up  perhaps  layers  of  hay  or  straw 
as  couches,  on  which  to  rest  their  weary  and  foot-sore 
bodies.  Here  those  unfortunate  Jews,  victims  of  the  disas- 
trous war  of  the  revolution,  lived  and  died.  (A  cemetery 
has  since  been  discovered  in  that  vicinity,  attesting  the 
separate  habitation  of  some  Jews  there;  Garrucci,  in 
Friedlaender,  Darstell.  aus  der  Sittengesch.  Rom's,  iii.  576)- 
The  invidious  satirist  grudged  them  even  those  dingy 
abodes,  because — the  Muses  were  by  them  forced  out  of 
their  sacred  dwelling-place. 

That  his  knowledge  of  the  Jews  was,  as  we  have  already 
observed  before,  exclusively  or  at  least  very  largely  confined 
to  the  poor  of  them,  may  be  deduced  not  only  from  satires 
iii.  16  and  v.  543,  but  also  from  iii.  296.  And  those  he  at 
once  degrades,  too,  to  the  low  level  of  beggars.  Possibly 
he  noticed  here  and  there  among  poor  Jews,  that  their 
utensils  consisted  in  no  more  nor  better  things  than  "  a 
basket  and  hay."  It  may  be,  too,  that  he  once  noticed 
a  poor  Jewish  woman,  following  the  unenviable  profession 
of  a  fortune-teller,  "beg  in  the  ear"  of  an  inquisitive 
Roman  noblewoman,  and  offer,  for  a  pittance,  to  disclose 
the  future  to  her,  for  "  the  Jews  were  selling  any   kinds  of 


THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY.  131 

dreams  for  the  smallest  fee."  But"  was  all  this,  if  it  trans- 
pired in  fact,  sufficient  ground  for  insinuating,  as  he  does 
in  his  writings,  that  the  Jews  were  a  sort  of  shiftless 
vagrants  ? 

On  the  other  side,  we  ought  not  to  make  such  a  reproach- 
ful account  of  this  disparagement  of  the  Jews,  considering 
that  he  once,  in  a  manner,  allowed  himself  to  be  identified 
with  them.  In  the  above-cited  third  satire  he  describes 
how  he  was  once  mistaken  for  a  Jetvish  beggar.  He 
introduces  there  a  drunken  rowdy  who  attacked  him  as  he 
once  walked  alone  of  a  night  along  some  streets  of  the 
city.  Drunken  ruffians  were,  as  he  remarks,  in  the  habit  of 
rudely  and  abruptly  attacking  solitary  people  of  mean 
estates,  who  would  naturally  pass  the  streets  without 
attendants  carrying  torches  before  them,  in  which  those  of 
better  station  could  indulge.  The  assailant  suddenly 
stopped  and  made  him  answer  the  question,  What  coarse 
meal  he  had  for  supper.-*  and,  Where  he  put  up;  in  what 
proseiicha  he  should  look  for  him  } 

How  shabby  must  his  appearance  have  been,  if  he  could 
be  mistaken  for  a  Jewish  mendicant  ! 

His  description  makes,  furthermore,  the  inevitable 
impression,  that  he  had  not  only  himself  associated  in  his 
mind  the  Jews  with  street-beggars,  but  was  prompted  by 
the  inglorious  design  to  represent  the  Jews  as  a  class  as 
being  in  the  low  state  of  mendicancy. 

As  to  the  question  occurring  in  said  satire,  "  In  what 
synagogue  shall  I  seek  thee  T  we  may  in  conclusion  add, 
that  it  at  the  same  time  offers  us  a  bit  of  valuable  informa- 
tion. We  infer  from  it  that  the  custom  of  beggars  and 
transient  poor  taking  up  their  nightly  abodes  in  synagogues, 
either  in  the  apartment  adjoining  the  place  of  worship 
proper,  which  was  used  as  a  school-room  for  children,  or  in 
the  room  of  worship  itself,  had  not  only  existed  among 
oriental  Jews  (  see  B.  Pesachim,  f  lOi  ),  but  apparently  also 
in  Rome. 

A  sentiment  congenial  to  that  of  Juvenal,  is  presented  to 
us  by  the  epigrammatist  Martial,  his  older  contemporary 
and  friend.  He  is  notorious  for  his  mercenary,  base  flat- 
tery of  the  emperor  Domitian,  as  well  as  a  number  of 
courtiers  and  wealthy  patrons  among  the  civilians.  His 
rhymes  were  sold  to  the  highest  bidders.  His  extreme 
efforts  to  magnify  the  emperor  to  the  sky,  met,  it  is  true, 
with  no  ready  response  to  his  suit  for  a  considerable 
sum  of  money.  Yet  there  were  others  weak  enough  to  be 
taken  in  by  his  fawning  encomiums.  They  paid  him  well 
for  them.     It  was  perhaps,  we   suggest,  for  that  refusal  by 


132  THE  SABBATH  IN  HISTORY. 

the  emperor,  that  he  avenged  himself  on  him  after  his 
death  by  representing  him  as  "  the  monster  of  the  times, 
without  one  virtue  to  redeem  it  "(  see  translator  in  Bohn's 
Library).  Similarly  the  case  may  have  been  regarding  his 
bitter  sentiment  against  the  Jews.  It  may  have  been  due  to 
the  vexatious  experience  he  made  with  a  certain  Jewish 
poet.  In  epigram  94,  book  xi.,  he  addresses  himself  to  a 
rival  composer  of  verses,  of  the  Jewish  persuasion,  rebuking 
him  sharply  for  carping  at  his  writings,  and  for  the  worse 
trespass  of  stealing  his  verses.  But  for  all  this  he  could 
pardon  him,  had  he  not  additionally  attempted  to  seduce 
the  object  of  his  affection.  For  this  most  grievous  offence 
he  challenges  him  in  these  words  :  "  You  deny  that  such  is 
the  case,  and  swear  by  the  temple  of  Jupiter.  I  do  not 
believe  you  ;  swear,  circumcised  poet,  by  Anchialus."  That 
our  conjecture  is  not  so  far-fetched,  will  be  conceded  by  all 
those  whose  knowledge  of  Jewish  affairs  extends  below  the 
surface.  It  is  an  undeniable  fact,  that  the  acrimony  of 
many  a  Jew-hunter  in  some  European  countries,  even  in 
modern  days,  could  in  some  instances  be  traced  to  the 
refusal  of  a  loan  or  an  important  favor  on  the  part  of  a 
single  or  several  Jewish  persons. 

Martial  may  then  have  identified  the  Jews  with  the  class 
of  mendicants  on  account  of  his  ill-will  toward  his  double 
Jewish  rival.  Be  this  as  it  may,  we  should  at  any  rate 
least  expect  that  he,  beggar  himself — he  was  constantly 
asking  his  patrons  for  presents,  as  for  a  doga,  a  cloak,  etc. 
(see  Friedlaender,  Darstell.  aus  der  Sittengesch.  Rom's,  iii. 
398)  —  would  deal  so  angrily  with  the  poor  Jews,  as  he 
really  does  in  the  seventy-fifth  of  the  xii.  book  of  his 
epigrams.  Replying  in  it  to  the  interrogation  of  a  friend, 
why  he  went  so  often  out  of  the  city  and  repaired  to  his 
small  farm  at  (or  near)  "  arid  Nomentum,"  he  states  as  the 
reason  the  unbearable  din  of  city  life.  A  tremendous  noise 
was  constantly  disturbing  him  during  the  day,  one  kind  of 
which  was  the  endless  annoyance  (of  himself,  personally  .'') 
by  "  the  Jew  taught  by  his  mother  to  beg"  (a  matre  doctus 
nee  [sc.  cessat]  rogare  Judaeus). 

He  evidently  wished  to  picture  the  Jews  here  as  a  class 
of  beggars,  importuning  people  on  the  streets  for  gifts,  and 
being  with  their  petitions  loud  enough  to  disturb  him,  the 
musing  poet,  even  in  his  study,  though  it  was  situated  as 
high  as  the  third  story  of  a  house  on  the  Ouirinal ! 


^\)e  Sabbatl7  \r)  JHistory 


Dr.  Isaac  Schwab, 


RABBI 


ST.  JOSEPH,  MO. 


PART    II. 


She^sibbath  in  primitive  Qhi^'stianity 
U/ith  Jesus  and  the  ^postles. 


St.  JosBph,  Mo 

St    Jo««ph   Staam  Printing  Co 

1889 


Copyright,  December,  li 
by 
Dr.  Isaac  Schwab. 


PREFACE. 


Nothing  daunted  by  the  great  indifference  with  which 
the  author's  Part  First  published  just  a  year  ago  was 
treated  at  the  hands  of  all  but  a  few  of  those  who  were 
most  expected  to  be  devoutly  concerned  for  a  literary  pro- 
duction of  this  kind,  he  now  launches  out  the  Second. 
Neither  does  he  allow  any  sullenness  to  come  on  him  and 
get  the  better  of  his  temper  of  mind  in  the  recollection  of 
the  many  annoying  experiences  which  he  underwent  in  his 
effort  at  interesting  in  his  first  and,  again,  in  this  second 
book  those  whom  he  so  safely  anticipated  to  be  alive  to 
their  importance  and  become  his  ready  patrons.  He  is,  on 
the  contrary,  buoyed  up  with  strong  hope  that  "  The 
Sabbath  in  History"  will  gradually  make  its  way  into  many 
libraries  of  both  Jews  and  Christians,  and  even  force 
recognition  as  a  deserving  contribution  to  religious-histor- 
ical science  from  that  large  class  habitually  apathetic  to 
serious  Jewish  literature.  He  trusts  withal  that  Providence 
will  aid  him  in  carrying  through  his  plan  of  putting  before 
the  world  a  complete  history  of  the  sacred  Sabbath. 

He  contemplates  publishing  the  Third  Part  which  is  to 
close  the  first  volume  of  his  work,  next  spring.  There  will 
follow  a  second  and  third  volume ;  the  one  treating  of  the 
Sabbath  in  olden  Rabbinism  and  in  the  Middle  Ages,  the 
other  bringing  its  history  from  thence  to  our  own  times. 

It  was  mainly  economical  causes  that  decided  him  to 
narrow  the  range  of  the  present  treatise  to  the  period  of 
Jesus  and  the  Apostles. '  The  Third  Part  will  contain  these 
divisions  :  The  Sabbath  with  Paul  and  other  Hellenistic 
Jewish  Christians  ;  the  Sabbath  with  the  Jewish  Christian 
sects  of  the  Nazarenes  and  Ebionites  ;  and  the  Sabbath  as 
regarded  by  Gentile  Christians  till  the  fourth  century  C.  E. 


136 


I'RKKACK 


The  author  confidently  expects  that  every  enlightened 
reader  will  give  him  credit  for  manifesting  in  the  present 
book  a  conscientious  seriousness  as  well  as  scientific 
honesty.  As  to  its  other  merits  let  the  book  answer  for 
itself  Regarding  the  various  deductions  and  assertions 
given  forth  in  it,  he  submits  .them  to  competent  and 
unbiased  critics  who  will,  he  hopes,  accurately  and  cau- 
tiously ponder  before  pronouncing  on  them.  If  that  be 
done,  let  their  verdict  come  forward  frankly.  By  the  fric- 
tion of  critical  estimate  there  may  yet  more  clear  light  be 
created  to  be  thrown  on  the  subject-matter  of  his  book. 
History,  being,  as  Cicero  says,  "  the  light  of  truth,"  would 
thus  but  the  more  essentially  be  benefited.  But  let  the 
judgment  of  the  critics  be  uttered  with  due  decorum,  the 
same  the  author  himself  affirms  to  have  maintained  through 
his  entire  book. 

May  it  win  acceptance  and  good  graces  from  the  intellec- 
tual reading  public  for  whom  it  is  intended. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  V. 
The  Position  of  Jesus  ou  the  Mosaic  Law 141 

CHAPTER  VI. 
Jesus'  Heterodox  Position  even  ou  the  Decalogue 14ti 

CHAPTER  VII. 

Jesus  Halts  between  the  Acknowledgment  of  the  Authority  of 

the  Mosaic  Law  aud  the  Problem  of  its  Abrogation  .  149 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

Ceremonial   Religion   Recedes   in   Jesus'    Mind   and    Teaching 

before  his  All-absorbing  Messiahdom ir>2 

CHAPTER  IX. 

Jesus'  Indiffereuce  to  the  Jewish  Ceremonial  Religion  Account- 
able also  by  his  Prophetical  Claim 155 

CHAPTER  X. 

Jesus'  IndifiEerent  Treatment  of  Ceremonial  Religion  Owing 
perhaps  also  to  Some  Peculiar  Messianic  Traditions  aud 
Popular  Notions 158 

CHAPTER  XI. 

Jesus'  Position  on  the  Sabbath  -  His  Two  Sabbath  Coutrovei"- 

sies l(jl 

CHAPTER  XII. 

The  Other  Four  Sabbath  Controversies  in  the  Gospels  ....  174 


1^.8 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

Retrospect  as  to  Jesus'  Positiou  ou  the  Sabbath 

CHAPTER  XIV. 
The  Sabbath  with  Jesus'  Disciples  in  his  Lifetime    .... 

CHAPTER  XV. 
The  Sabbath  with  the  Disciples  of  Jesus  after  his  Death 

CHAPTER  XVI. 
The  Jewish  Christians  Ride  on  Animals  on  the  Sabbath  (?) 


Page. 


182 


lyi 


201 


233 


Note  34  (  marked  in  the  text  beside  the  last  word  on  page  145 ) : 
The  Judicial  Persecution  of  Jesus  and  of  Some  Jewish 
Christians  after  him  for  Antinomian  Infidelity,  By  the 
Statute  of  Numbers  xv.  30,  31  —  A  New  View 


Rest  of  Notes 


Excursus  A , 


Excursus  B  , 


241-273 
273-297 
298-301 
302-314 
314-318 
319-320 


Excursus  C 


Excursus  D 


TH[  SABBATH  IN  PRIMITIVE  CHfilSTIANIT!, 

CHAPTER  V. 


THE   POSITION   OF  JESUS   ON   THE   MOSAIC    LAW. 

We  have  in  our  yet  unpublished  work  "The  Mineans  of 
the  Rabbinic  Writings,"  of  which  one  division,  "The  Essenes 
as  Mineans,"  and  again  another  part,  appeared  about  two 
years  ago  in  the  'American  Israelite,'  set  forth  the  point  of 
view  thus  far  entirely  left  out  of  sight  by  both  Christian  and 
Jewish  writers  on  early  Christianity,  that  one  chief  cause  of 
the  intense  aversion  of  all  classes  of  orthodox  Jews  against 
Jesus  was,  his  heterodox  doctrine  about  the  authority  of  the 
Mosaic  Law.  He  surely  did  not  hold  its  Divine  authority 
in  all  its  enactments  and  enunciations,  as  was  the  concep- 
tion of  the  faithful  Jews.  The  dogmatic  expression  for  this 
orthodox  belief  was,  Torah  min  ha-shamayim.  "the  Torah  is 
from  Heaven"  (God).  Alike  the  Sadducees  and  the  Phari- 
sees, and  with  the  latter  the  large  body  of  the  Jewish  peo- 
ple, firmly  maintained  and  adhered  to  it.  Only  the  Essenes 
with  their  rejection  of  sacrifice  and  defection  from  the 
national  worship  of  Israel  as  established  on  the  basis  of  the 
Mosaic  ritual,  must  have  contested  the  truth  of  that  dogma. 
They  will,  as  we  proposed  in  that  disquisition  on  the 
Essenes,  either  have  heretically  declared  the  relative  Mosaic 
ordinances  interpolated  and  not  forming  part  of  the  original 
law  of  God,  as  their  later  Ebionite  kindred,  judging  from 
the  Clementine  Homilies,  contended,  or  treated  them  in 
practice  with  total  unconcern,  explaining  them,  at  most, 
figuratively,  as  types  of  certain  virtues  and  moral  qualities^ 
in  the  manner  of  the  Alexandrine  allegorizers. 

(2) 


142  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

That  the  latter  mode  of  Scripture  interpretation  subsisted 
with  the  Essenes,  is  testified  by  Philo,  in  'On  the  virtuous 
being  also  free,'  ch.  xii.  Having  before  credited  them  with 
cultivating  "most  strenuously  the  ^MzVrt/ part  of  philosophy, 
in  which  work  they  employ  as  teachers  the  ancestral  laws," 
he  states  afterwards,  when  he  relates  that  the  exposition  of 
Scripture  followed  its  public  reading  on  the  Sabbath,  that 
"most  (Mosaical  precepts)  are  studied  with  them  by  the  aid 
of  symbols,"  that  is,  by  that  method  aiming  to  discover  a 
hidden  ethical  meaning  in  the  material  letter. 

That  they  were  also,  on  the  other  hand,  eclectic  with 
regard  to  the  Mosaic  precepts,  may  be  gathered  from 
Josephus  who,  in  Wars,  ii.  8,  6,  attests  their  zealous  occu- 
pation with  the  Scriptures  of  the  ancients,  in  which  they 
chiefly  "choose  those  precepts  conducive  to  the  benefit  of 
the  soul  and  the  body."  This  statement  does,  it  is  true,  not 
at  once  imply  a  rejection  of  the  rest  of  the  Mosaic  precepts, 
which  did  not  afford  to  them  any  intellectual  or  physical 
benefit.  But  if  we  are  permitted  to  trace  the  Ebionite  pre- 
tense of  the  spuriousness  of  the  sacrificial  ordinances  and 
many  other  appointments  and  utterances  of  the  Pentateuch 
to  their  original  stock,  the  Essenes  (and  why  should  we  not 
be?),  that  eclecticism  gains  the  substantial  character  of  a 
total  Essenic  repudiation  of  all  those  parts  of  the  Mosaic 
dispensation,  contrary  to  their  own  philosophico-ascetic 
doctrines.  The  above  alternative  that  they  may  have 
declared  the  sacrificial  ritual  of  the  Pentateuch  as  spurious 
and  not  coming  from  the  "God-inspired  Moses,"  not  to 
say,  from  God,  will  accordingly  have  a  greater  likelihood. 

That  they  thus  trampled  the  orthodox  dogma  of  the 
Divine  origin  of  the  entire  Torah  under  foot,  and  must  for 
this  apostasy  alone  have  passed  as  heretics,  will  appear  to 
the  reader  as  self-evident.  Jesus,  having  shared  with  the 
Essenes  the  opposition  to  the  sacrificial  Temple  service,^' 
cannot  possibly  have  believed  in  the  Divine  authority  of  the 
sacrificial  ritual  as  ordained  in  the  Pentateuch,  or  in  the 

See  Excursus  A. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  I43 

Divine  command  of  the  manifold  ritual  institutions  laid  down 
in  it  as  pertaining  to  or  connected  with  the  national-relig- 
ious worship  of  Israel. 

That  opposition  of  Jesus  incontrovertibly  results  from  the 
account  of  the  deposition  of  the  witnesses  made  at  his  trial 
before  the  Synhedrin  (Matt.  xxvi.  6r,  comp.  xxiv.  2;  Mark 
xiv.  58);  from  Matthew  xxi.  12,  and  parallel  of  Mark  xi.  16, 
17;  from  Matthew  xii.  6  (we  do  not  refer  to  xxiv.  2,  and  par- 
allel in  Mark  xiii.  2,  for  these  sentiments  were  added  later, 
after  the  accomplished  fact);  from  his  repeated  employment 
of  the  phrase  adopted  from  Hosea,  "I  will  have  mercy  and 
not  sacrifice,"  and  this  even  on  occasions  and  in  connections 
where  there  was  no  logical  need  of  it  whatever  (see  Matt. 
ix.  13,  xii.  7);  from  his  emphasis  of  the  purpose  of  the  Tem- 
ple to  be  a  house  of  prayer  [only]  (Matt.  xxi.  13,  Mark  xi. 
17);  and  further,  from  the  fact  that  he  is  not  known  from 
the  Synoptics — only  from  the  fourth  gospel — to  have  ever 
made  any  festival  journeys  to  Jerusalem  (so  Keim;  see  also 
Strauss  "A  New  Life  of  Jesus,"  i.  234).  His  last  expedition 
thither  about  the  Passover  season  had  a  mere  Messianic  ob- 
ject. Even  his  Paschal  supper — the  last  one  of  his  life- 
shows  no  other  concern,  premeditated  or  only  incidental, 
than  for  the  exhibiting  of  his  own  symbols  of  bread  and 
wine,  and  not  for  the  Paschal  lamb  itself.  The  latter,  while 
we  must  not  dispute  the  Synoptical  account  of  its  prepara- 
tion for  his  immediate  circle  of  adherents,  can,  at  most,  be 
regarded  as  being  prepared  out  of  accommodation  to  cir- 
cumstances, but  not  from  a  sense  of  religious  obligation  on 
his  part.  For,  if  he  had  indeed  laid  any  value  on  the 
Paschal  sacrifice,  its  flesh  served  at  the  meal  would  by  all 
means  have  offered  a  much  more  appropriate  object  of 
reflection  with  regard  to  remission  of  sins,  than  could  bread 
and  wine.  Moreover,  such  preparation  from  the  sense  of 
ceremonial  obligation,  would  have  conflicted  most  seriously 
with  his  obviously  settled  opposition  to  all  sacrifice. 

And  surely  is  his  denial  of  the  Divine  authority  of  the 
Mosaic  Law  again  proved  from  his  antithetical  arraign- 
ment, in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  of  oaths,  which  are  at 
any  rate  sanctioned  in  the  Pentateuch  (see  Deut.  vi.   13, 


144  f^HE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

Numb.  XXX.  3);  of  the  judicial  laws  of  retaliation  (see 
Exodus  xxi.  22-25,  Lev.  xxiv.  19,  20,  Deut.  xix.  16-21);  of 
the  law  of  divorce  (see  Deut.  xxiv.  i)  ;  and,  above  all,  from 
his  avowing  himself  the  Lord  of  the  Sabbath  (which  self- 
evidently  implied  also  all  the  Mosaic  holy  days). 

Whether  Jesus  had  adopted  the  philosophical  anti- 
anthropomorphic  view  of  the  Law  being  given  through 
angels,*  a  view  expressly  maintained  by  the  Hellenists 
Stephen  (Acts  vii.  38,  53)  and  Paul  (Gal.  iii.  19),  or  the 
opinion  that  it  had  an  exclusively  human,  Mosaic,  origin, 
he  had  in  either  case  set  himself  radically  at  variance  with 
the  large  body  of  the  orthodox  Jews.  The  second  alterna- 
tive of  his  attributing  to  the  Mosaic  Law  a  mere  human 
authority,  seems  more  plausible,  from  his  open,  and,  at 
times,  implied  contest  against  many  Mosaic  enactments, 
and  in  especial  from  his  following  utterance. 

To  defend  his  attitude  towards  the  institution  of  divorce 
expressed  in  his  noted  Sermon  (Matt.  v.  31,  32;  comp.  Mark 
x.  3  sq.),  he  represents  Moses,  in  his  reply  to  the  Pharisees 
questioning  him  on  his  pronounced  antagonism  to  it  (in  the 
correct  form  delivered  by  Mark,  x.  2,  which  Keim,  'History 
of  Jesus,'  V.  28,  maintains  to  be  the  original),  as  the  arbitrary 
deviser  and  framer  of  the  respective  ordinance  (Mark,  ib.  5> 
Matt.  xix.  8).  On  this  occasion,  it  would  appear,  he  has 
once  for  all  explicitly  disclosed  his  mind  on  the  origin  of 
the  Mosaic  dispensation.  This  disclosure  was,  that  he  held 
it  as  having  proceeded — if  in  its  parts,  so  logically  in  the 
whole — from  Moses,  and  was  not  immediately  communi- 
cated or  even  directly  inspired  by  God.  Nay,  he  has  by  that 
sharp  contrast  between  an  original  law  of  God  and  its  later 
alteration  by  Moses,  which  he  put  forth  at  that  controversy, 
laid  himself  open  to  the  suspicion  that  he  entertained  the 
enormously  un-Jewish  notion,  perhaps  already  deeply 
rooted  in  the  Jewish  Essenism,  but  appearing  in  t  e  rankest 
growth  in  Christian  Essenic  productions  of  the  second  cen- 
tury, C.  E.,  that  all  parts  of  the  Mosaic  ritual  not  congenial 
with  a  self-created  religio-philosophical  system,  were  to  be 
adjudged  spurious. 

*  See  Excursus  B. 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  I45 

Even  if  Jesus  could  be  thought  as  totally  disconnected 
with  Essenism, — what  will  at  all  times  rennain  impossible 
to  substantiate,  so  strong  and  so  manifold  are  his  points  of 
contact  with  that  heterodox  sect, —  we  would  at  any  rate, 
in  consequence  of  that  unqualified  antithesis,  have  to  assert, 
that  he  had  by  it  paved  the  way  for  the  generalizing  dis- 
tinction of  the  later  Christian  Essenes  between  the  "true 
things  "of  the  Law,  as  coming  from  the  God-inspired  Moses, 
and  the  spurious  ones  in  it,  as  being  written  down  by  some 
one  after  the  death  of  Moses  (Clem.  Hom.  iii.  47),  who  was 
instigated  by  the  evil  one  to  do  so  (ib.  ii.  38).  Jesus  has,  it 
is  true,  not  extended  his  contrast  farther  than  between  God 
and  Moses.  But  such  a  dogmatic  digression  once  made,  it 
was  on  its  authority,  as  being  that  of  the  "true  prophet" 
(Jesus),  who  was  esteemed  so  supremely  by  the  Ebionites, 
easily  enlarged  by  this'sect.  The  later  Ebionites  who  dis- 
tinguished no  more  between  an  original  lavv  of  God  and  a 
succeeding  one  of  Moses,  but  between  an  unwritten  tradi- 
tional, merely  God-inspired  law  of  Moses  (their  marked 
abhorrence  of  every  thought  of.  materiality  connected  with 
God  excluded  of  itself  the  assumption  of  anj^  law  being 
given  by  God  to  man)  and  a  written  law,  in  which  true  and 
false  things  were  mixed  (the  former  alone  being  "from  the 
tradition  of  Moses"),  and,  again,  between  those  true  and 
false  things  themselves,  the  latter  of  which  were  those  not 
consonant  with  their  peculiar  religio-philosophical  system 
(see  Clem.  Hom.),  have  doubtless  started  from  the  platform, 
the  outlines  of  which  were  given  by  Jesus. 

In  whatever  light  the  antithesis  in  point  in  its  re-asser- 
tion at  that  polemical  encounter  may  be  viewed  by  different 
expounders  and  readers,  no  one  will  be  able  to  dispute,  that 
Jesus  has  in  his  outspoken  negative  position  on  divorce,  and 
the  manner  of  his  antagonism  to  it,  positively  disowned  the 
Divine  authority  of  this  ordinance,  thus  deserting  the  ortho- 
dox Jewish  belief  that  all  Mosaic  ordinances  alike  have  a 
Divine  origin. 


CHAPTER  VI. 


JESUS'    HETERODOX    POSITION    EVEN    ON    THE    DECALOGUE. 

In  the  above-noted  unpublished  work  of  ours  we  main- 
tain, that  Jesus  has  not  attributed  Divine  authority  even  to 
the  Decalogue.  We  prove  this,  first,  from  the  expression 
he  used  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  "  it  was  said  by  them 
of  old"  (Matt.  V.  2i),  instead  of  giving  it,  in  the  ordinary 
way  of  the  orthodox  Jews,  "  the  Torah  says,"  or,  to  avoid 
all  misconstruction  of  his  intent,  "God's  word  teaches  us." 
The  phrase  as  employed  by  him,  has  by  all  means  an  eva- 
sive character.  We  can  compare  it,  with  Philo's  "  men  of 
old,"  when  he  speaks  of  the  rite  of  circumcision  (Bohn's 
Libr.  ed.  iii.  p.  176).  That  Jesus  has  once,  in  a  controversy, 
referred  to  the  fifth  commandment  of  the  Decalogue  as 
"the  commandment  of  God"  (Matt.  xv.  3),  cannot  be  ac- 
counted an  offset  to  the  impression  which  that  phrase  in 
his  Sermon  necessarily  makes.  It  can  easily  be  supposed 
that  the  spirit  of  controversy  had  elicited  that  acknowledg- 
ment. For  he  had  to  bring  it  out  in  a  direct  way  and  with 
some  emphasis,  in  order  to  set  forth  the  contrast  which  he 
wished  to  illustrate  with  a  striking  pointedness. 

Secondly,  Jesus'  attempt  at  correcting  and  improving 
upon  part  of  the  Decalogue  in  the  Sermon,  cannot  possibly 
harmonize  with  a  perception  of  its  immediate  revelation  by 
God.  God's  word,  believed  to  be  such,  can  never  be  sub- 
jected to  improvement.  If  the  objection  is  made,  that 
single  reforms  of  Mosaic  ordinances  were  attempted  even  in 
orthodox  Judaism,  from  the  earlier  age  of  Ezekiel  down  to 
the  period  of  Rabbi  Judah,  the  Patriarch,  we  have  to  assert 
in  reply,  that  no  spirit  of  opposition  to  them,  or  denial  of 
their  Divine  origin,  moved  the  single  representative  men 
or  collective  authorities  to  decide  upon  respective  altera- 
tions. It  is  provable  that  the  Jewish  reforms  undertaken 
at  certain   periods   of  antiquity,   were  due  either   to   such 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  I47 

economical  conditions  as  demanded  most  urgently  a  sus- 
pension of  this  or  that  law,  or,  as  was  more  frequently  the 
case,  to  the  sincere  belief  and  conviction  that  the  best 
interests  of  Judaism  required  a  judicious  setting  aside  of  a 
certain  ordinance,  that  the  more  essential  part  of  the  Mosaic 
ritual  and  withal  the  monotheistic  principle  and  practice 
itself,  should  suffer  no  impairment.  Furthermore,  all  or 
nearly  all  such  alterations  made  at  times  by  Jewish  author- 
ities of  old,  were  intended  only  as  temporary,  and  not  as 
total  abolitions.  Even  if  the  latter  were  occasionally 
intended,  it  was  done  with  the  direct  aim  of  giving  a  more 
solid  support  to  other  laws  held  too  essential,  and  affecting 
too  deeply  the  very  substance  of  Judaism  to  be  even  tem- 
porarily neglected.  No  one  of  those  reforming  men  and 
councils  ever  presumed  to  question  the  Divine  authority  of 
the  body  of  the  Mosaic  ritual  or  any  portion  of  it,  or  to 
suggest  a  human  improvement  of  the  purport  and  bearing 
of  the  Law,  which  all  the  orthodox  truly  believed  to  be 
Divinely  given  in  its  entirety.  None  of  them  would  pre- 
sume to  place  the  wisdom  of  their  own  '  I  '  above  that  of 
the  'I  Am',  the  Author  of  that  irrevocable  Law.  It  was 
only  Jesus  who  practically  did  so. 

Thirdly,  no  true  believer  of  the  Divine  authority  of  the 
Decalogue  would  ever  have  dared  to  explain  away  any 
single  one  commandment  of  it,  as  we  see  that  Jesus  did 
with  the  third,  indirectly  at  least,  by  his  unqualified  declara- 
tion against  all  oaths  (Matt.  v.  33,  34). 

Fourthly,  we  will  ask,  could  he,  had  he  really  attributed 
Divine  authority  to  the  Decalogue,  have  left  out,  in  the 
enumeration  of  the  commandments,  the  observance  of 
.which  insured  entrance  into  the  world  to  come  (see  Matt, 
xix.  16  sq.),  all  the  first  four  commandments  ?  Could  he — 
and  this  question  is  more  directly  to  the  purpose  of  our 
main  theme — have  eliminated  from  it  the  Sabbath  observ- 
ance, if  he  believed  it  directly  enjoined  by  God  as  the  fourth 
commandment  ^  Surely,  if  the  observance  of  any  of  the 
Divine  commands  conditioned  an  Israelite's  share  in  the 
good  of  the  future  world,  must  the  Sabbath  have  been  con- 
sidered   of    such    importance    by    any   orthodox    Israelite. 


148  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

None  such  would  exempt  or  omit  the  Sabbath  law  from  the 
range  of  those  religious  obligations,  indispensable  for 
acceptance  with  God  for  rewards  and  benefits  here  and 
hereafter. 

The  Sabbath  must  then  have  appeared  to  Jesus  as  not  of 
Divine  origin,— a  conclusion  which  is  the  more  indisputably 
confirmed  by  his  assertion  about  himself:  "For  the  Son 
of  man  is  lord  of  the  Sabbath"  (Matt.  xii.  8),  by  which  he 
meant  to  state  that  his  own  authority  had  superseded  that 
inherent  in  the  Mosaic  Sabbath  law.  This,  he  pretended, 
had  to  yield  to  his  own  directions,  whenever  he  saw  fit  to 
give  them. 


CHAPTER  VII. 


JESUS  MALTS  BETWEEN  THE  ACKNOWLEDGMENT  OF  THE 
AUTHORITY  OF  THE  MOSAIC  LAW  AND  THE  PROBLEM  OF 
ITS   ABROGATION. 

Our  view,  also  elaborated  in  our  work  on  the  'Mineans' 
is,  that  Jesus,  while  evidently  disavowing  the  Divine  author- 
ity of  the  Mosaic  Law,  even  of  the  Decalogue,  has  yet  not 
openly  declared  the  ceremonial  religion  of  Israel  as  abro- 
gated. But  since  it  cannot  be  denied  that  from  the  nega- 
tion of  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Law  to  the  negation  of 
its  permanent  obligation,  there  was  but  one  step,  Jesus 
must  be  regarded  as  the  spiritual  author  of  the  later  grow- 
ing .pretension  of  its  abolition,  which  men  like  Stephen, 
Barnabas  and  Paul  put  forth  in  a  decided,  radical  way. 
Jesus  only  dropped  the  seed  of  this  heterodoxy  in  the  soil 
of  Christianity.  The  harvest  was  later  reaped  by  the  Hel- 
lenistic and  Gentile  Christians.  These  did  not  hesitate,  in 
view  of  the  unquestionable  opposition  of  Jesus  to  the  tradi- 
tional estimation  of  the  ceremonial  Mosaism,  to  recognize 
him  as  endowed  with  the  authority  of  abolishing  it.  They 
interpreted  his  religion  —as  they  were  warranted  to  do 
from  his  delivered  speeches  and  declarations — as  being 
more  or  less  directly  a  system  of  natural  precepts.  In  this 
natural  Jesus-religion  the  Decalogue,  or  rather  Hexalogue, 
assumed  a  superior  place.  [See  Irenaeus,  Ag.  Her.  iv.  13, 
where  he  dilates  on  the  natural  Lazv  which  Jesus  has  not 
annulled,  referring  to  Matt.  v.  21  seq  That  the  Decalogue 
became  to  the  Christians  the  real  body  of  the  Law,  strictly 
so  called,  as  the  synopsis  of  Mosaism,  is  evident  from  the 
Apostolical  Constitutions,  vi.  20,  et  passim,  and  especially 
from  the  Talmud,  B.  Berachoth  f  12,  where  we  read,  that 
"the  Jewish  communities  outside  of  Jerusalem  wished  to 
follow  the  Temple  usage  of  reciting,  at  the  morning  ser- 
vice in   the  court-hall,  the    Decalogue  immediately  before 


I50  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

the  Shema,  but  that  the  authorities  (would  not  permit  them 
to,  as  they)  had  already  (even  for  the  service  in  the  Tem- 
ple) abolished  this  custom  on  account  of  the  objection  of 
the  Mineans."  ■•'■  By  these  Mineans  were  meant  heretical 
folks,  prominently  the  Jewish  Christian  schismatics.  That 
in  very  fact  not  the  entire  Ten  Words  formed  the  Law  of 
Christianity,  but  only  the  six  which  Jesus  had  named  to  the 
inquirino-  rich  young  man  (instead  of  the  tenth,  which  is, 
according  to  his  exposition  in  INlatt.  v.  28,  already  partially 
included  in  the  seventh,  he  uses  the  command  of  Jove  to 
the  neighbor,  ib.  xix.  19;  Mark  x.  19  uses  instead,  pecu- 
liarly enough,  "Do  not  defraud,"  which  restraint  does  surely 
not  occur  in  the  Decalogue),  appears  from  a  most  inter- 
esting passage  of  the  Tosifta,  Shebuoth  iii.  6,  where  the 
discussion  between  Rabbi  Reuben  and  a  philosopher — 
doubtless  a  Gentile  Christian — turns  on  the  Hexalogue, 
beginning  with  honor  to  parents  and  ending  with  the  pro- 
hibition of  covetousness.  From  this  passage  we  can  easily 
conclude  that  the  Christian  Law  was  just  this  selection  out 
of  the  Decalogue.  This  is  further  to  be  deduced  from  ch. 
12,  sect.  iv.  of  the  above-quoted  work  of  Irenaeus,  where  he 
reproduces  the  Hexalogue  as  the  Law  enjoined  by  Jesus, 
in  the  form  in  which  it  occurs  in  Matt.  xix.  16  sq.  In  the 
form  of  a  Pentalogue  the  Law  incumbent  on  the  Christians 
is  presented  by  Paul,  in  Rom.  xiii.  9.  Christianity  had 
accordingly  only  adopted  the  name  of  the  Decalogue,  but 
not  its  entire  contents,  as  the  Law  proper.]  It  was,  we 
hold,  doubtless  the  precepts  of  natural  religion  to  which 
Jesus  alluded  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  when  he 
declared:  "Think  not  that  I  came  to  destroy  the  law,  etc." 
(Matt.  V.  17,  19).  He  actually  mentioned  in  the  whole 
Sermon  not  one  of  the  ceremonial  appointments,  to  which 
his  affirmation  might  apply.  He  disserted  merely  on  some 
ethical  laws,^^  together  with  those  of  retaliation  and 
divorce.  The  question  of  his  opponents,  silently  under- 
stood from  his  protesting  words  of  v.  17,  whether  he  believed 
in  the  perpetual  obligation  of  the  whole  Mosaic  Law  with 
all    its    ceremonial    ordinances,    he    shirked    entirely.     He 

*  See  Excairsus  B. 


THE   SABBATH   IN   IHSTORY.  1 5  I. 

made  a  declaration  which  was  not  at  all  expected  by  his 
hearers,  or  by  those  for  whom  the  composition  was 
intended.  No  one  had  suspected  or  accused  him  of  an 
opposition  to  the  ethical  part  of  Mosaism  and  Judaism  in 
general.  By  nevertheless  dilating  on  some  portions  of  it, 
and  skipping  over  the  real  accusation  formed  against  him, 
he  laid  himself  open  to  the  criticfsm  that  his  purpose  in 
digressing  from  that  accusation  implied  in  v.  ly,  and  from 
his  asseveration  in  vv.  i8,  19  (if  this  be  genuine), ^^  to 
his  ethical  expositions,  was  that  of  evasion.  This  the 
inquirer  of  our  own  day  will  readily  discover.  That  he 
should,  in  any  part  of  his  affirmation,  have  adverted  to  the 
body  of  Mosaic  enactments,  is  impossible,  considering  his 
vehement  antagonism  to  the  Temple  ritual,  round  which 
clustered,  besides,  such  a  vast  range  of  other  ordinances,  as 
well  as  his  opposition  to  the  divorce  law,  and  especially  his 
utterance  on  the  Sabbath,  Matt.  xii.  8.  Indeed  would  an 
avowal  of  that  orthodox  nature,  were  it  even  to  be  con- 
strued from  his  affirmation,  have  been  most  inconsistent  in 
him  and  contradictory  to  his  entire  position,  which  we 
learn  him  to  have  held  from  various  passages  of  the  rela- 
tive extant  literature.  No,  it  is  beyond  any  doubt  that  the 
Mosaic  precepts  which  he  avowed  to  be  perpetual,  were 
the  moral  ones,  those  of  the  natural  religion.  As  to  the 
ceremonial  enactments  of  Mosaism,  he  may  yet,  for  all  the 
derogation  of  a  large  part  of  them,  be  credited  with  not 
having  come  to  destroy  or  abrogate  them.  For  we  posi- 
tively hold  that  the  main  and  direct  object  of  his  public 
activity  lay  outside  of  them.  They  were  indifferent  to  him, 
compared  with  the  exclusive  aim  that  possessed  him  from 
the  beginning  of  his  career,  to  assert  his  Messianic  dignity. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 


CEREMONIAL     RELIGION      RECEDES     IN     JESUS      MIND     AND 
TEACHING    BEFORE    HIS    ALL-ABSORBING    MESSiAHDOM. 

The  standpoint  we  assume  in  our  work  on  the  Mineans 
is,  that  the  pretension  of  being  the  Messiah  was  uppermost 
in  Jesus'  mind,  and  that  to  it  all  other  concerns  had  to  be 
made  subservient.  Claiming  as  he  did  to  be  the  inaugur- 
ator  of  the  Messianic  kingdom,  and  especially  to  reappear 
again  in  the  divine-like  capacity  of  Israel's  Messiah  for  its 
completion  (Matt.  xxiv.  30),  religious  rites,  even  those  of 
superior  sanctity,  were  to  him  only  of  a  subordinate  and 
secondary  value.  They  were  to  him  indifferent  compared 
to  the  object  he  pursued,  and  he  wished,  too,  that  they 
became  so  to  his  adherents.  The  chief  care  of  his  disciples 
and  followers  should  be,  to  prepare  themselves  for  the  im- 
pending event  of  the  world's  renovation  under  his  Messiah- 
dom,  by  repentance,  which  he,  like  his  predecessor,  John 
the  Baptist,  was  preaching  from  the  commencement  of  his 
public  course.  It  was  his  watchword  (so  Keim).  To  the 
cry  of  repentance  he  added  later  certain  precepts  of  moral 
righteousness,  conditioning  the  participation  in  the  world 
and  life  to  come.  These  precepts  were  joined  by  admon- 
itions to  acts  of  love  and  charity,  by  which  treasures  and 
fair  claims  of  reward  in  heaven'^^  would  be  secured;  see 
Matt.  vi.  20,  xix.  21.  When  we  compare  with  these  pas- 
sages the  account  in  Jer.  Peah  f  15,  of  Monobazus,  king  of 
Adiabene,  disposing  of  all(.'')  his  property  to  the  poor, 
which  act  of  charitable  self-disposssssion  he  related  as  being 
inspired  by  the  motive  of  "garnering  treasures  for  the 
world  to  come,"  we  cannot  help  noticing  the  actual  preva- 
lence, in  the  century  of  Jesus,  of  associating  the  merit  of 
charity  with  the  hope  of  the  future  world.  Charitable 
deeds  were  not  only  held  as  means  of  securing  God's  favor, 
but  also  as  advocating  agencies  in    turning   his    wrath    of 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  1 53 

judgment  for  sins,  alike  individual  and  communal,  the  com- 
mission of  which  was  feared  as  forming  the  cause  for  accu- 
sation and  prosecution  before  the  Divine  tribunal,  and  at 
the  same  time  as  delaying  the  realization  of  the  Messianic 
kingdom. 

The  combination  of  teshubah,  "repentance,"  with  maasim 
tobhim,  "good  works,"  that  is,  works  of  charity,  is  often 
found  in  the  Rabbinical  literature.  They  are  in  Pirke 
Aboth  iv.  13,  declared  to  be  "like  a  shield  against  Divine 
visitations."  As  interceding  agencies  for  Divine  pardon 
they  are  named  together  in  B.  Yoma  f.  87.  That  charity 
was  held  effective  in  expiating  sin  is  evident  from  B.  Ber- 
ach.  f.  5;  it  is  there  derived  from  Prov.  xvi.  6.  That  it 
saves  from  the  chastisement  of  hell  subsequent  to  the  judg- 
ment in  the  Hereafter,  was  without  great  violence  to  the 
letter  deduced  from  Prov.  xi.  4,  in  B.  Baba  Bathra  f.  10. 
Its  atoning  quality  is  once  even  set  above  that  of  sacrifice; 
see  B.  Yebamoth  f.  105. 

The  high  estimation  of  charity  for  propitiating  the  Deity 
was  rather  a  ground-sentiment  in  Judaism  of  old.  It  occurs 
also  in  Dan.  iv.  24,  and  in  Ecclesiasticus  iii.  30.  That  Jesus 
added  beneficence  to  the  poor  to  his  cry  of  repentance, 
would  then  easily  have  resulted  from  a  mere  Jewish  stand- 
point. Even  for  a  direct  Messianic  purpose,  that  combin- 
ation has  an  analogy  in  the  Talmudic  literature.  In  B. 
Synhedrin  f.  97,  it  is  related  that  Rabh,  the  renowned 
scholarch  of  Sura,  Babylonia,  in  the  first  half  of  the  third 
century,  C.  E.,  uttered  the  view,  that  "the  farthest  term 
computable  from  Scriptural  prophecies  for  the  arrival  of  the 
Messiah  was  now  reached:  his  coming  depends  yet  on  our 
repentance  and  good  works."  The  same  view  as  to  repent- 
ance is  expressed  in  Jer.  Taanith  f.  64:  "The  relief  from 
the  night  of  the  Roman  power  over  Israel  and  the  arrival 
of  the  Messiah,  the  son  of  David,  are  kept  back  solely  by 
the  lack  of  true  repentance."  Such  sentiments  were  indeed 
typical  in  old  Israel.  We  may  safely  lay  them  down  as 
having  existed  and  pervaded  the  religious  conscience  of 
the  thoughtful  and  pious  Israelites  in  the  times  of  the 
Roman  rule,  no  less  than  in  the  former  Persian  period;  see 


154  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

on  the  latter,  Ezra  v.  12;  ix.  7.  Every  grievous  sin  adher- 
ing to  individuals  or  the  community,  was  in  times  of 
oppressive  rule  and  national  suffering  considered  an  impedi- 
ment to  the  restoration  by  God  of  a  state  of  independence 
and  prosperity.  It  had  to  be  repented  of  and  atoned  for, 
in  order  to  conciliate  the  Deity  and  dispose  Him  toward  a 
cessation  of  such  suffering,  and  the  approximation  of  the 
glorious  era  so  vividly  hoped  for. 

The  notion  of  sin  interfering  with  the  enjoyment  of 
Messiahism  had  so  thoroughly  worked  itself  into  the 
minds  of  scrupulous  Rabbis  mentioned  in  the  Talmud, 
that  they  were  haunted  by  the  apprehension  lest  all 
their  merits  of  the  study  of  the  Torah  and  practice  of 
charity  would  not  suffice  to  be  held  worthy  by  the 
Deity  of  surviving  the  throes  of  the  Messianic  days 
and  witnessing  the  advent  of  the  Messiah,  because  they 
might  have  committed  sins  which  remained  unpardoned; 
see  B.  Synh.  f.  98,  and  compare  the  similar  sentiment  in 
B.  Berachoth  f.  4,  that  "some  sin  may  frustrate  the  bliss  of 
futurity."  The  relative  phrase  current  among  the  pious 
Rabbis  was,  shema  yigrom  hachet,  "sin  may  cause" 
(namely,  the  forfeiture  of  future  good).  Can  we  then  won- 
der that  the  Baptist  and  after  him  Jesus,  laid,  in  their 
preaching  of  the  Messianic  kingdom,  such  mighty  stress  on 
repentance  ?^^  They  only  echoed  a  sentiment  predomin- 
ant in  Judaism,  that  the  prerequisite  for  God's  favorable 
interference  against  heathen  oppression  and  for  the  com- 
mencement of  his  kingdom  represented  by  the  son  of 
David  (or  David  the  second;  see  B.  Synh.  f.  98)  was, 
repentance.  Meritorious  works  of  humanity,  too,  were,  as 
we  have  seen  above,  held  as  decided  expedients  for  win- 
ning God's  favor  and  accelerating  the  Messianic  kingdom. 
Jesus  naturally  urged  them  in  sympathy  with  other  Messi- 
anic aspirers  and  inquirers,  in  connection  with  repentance. 
And  as  to  religion  proper,  all  that  he  taught,  in  the  sus- 
pense of  what  was  by  him  presented  as  the  transition  to 
the  kingdom  of  Heaven,  to  be  indispensable  for  sharing  in 
the  benefits  of  his  Messiahdom  was,  to  observe  the  pre- 
cepts of  natural  religion. 


CHAPTER  IX. 


JESUS'   IIs^DIFFERENCE   TO   THE   JEWISH   CEREMONIAL   RELI- 
GION ACCOUNTABLE  ALSO  BY   HIS  PROPHETICAL  CLAIM. 

We  have  in  the  foregoing  exposition  aimed  to  establish 
that  Jesus  treated  ceremonial  observances  as  insignificant 
because  of  his  Messianic  pretension,  which  had  engrossed 
his  mind  and  pushed  aside  all  other  spiritual  cares.  We 
will  in  this  chapter  go  some  further  and  show  that  he  has, 
more  or  less  overtly,  passed  him'self  as  the  prophet  em- 
powered to  suspend  or  change  the  Mosaic  ritual.  That  he 
actually  put  forth  the  claim  to  be  the  prophet  predicted  in 
Deut.  xviii.  15  sq.,  we  have  no  doubt.  It  is  not  only  testi- 
fied in  the  fourth  gospel  (v.  46),  but  the  fluent  application 
of  that  Deuteronomical  prediction  to  Jesus  in  the  speech  of 
Peter  (Acts  iii.  22),  as  well  as  its  quotation  by  Stephen  in 
his  harangue  of  apology  (ib.  vii.  37),  which  can  evidently 
have  had  no  other  object  than  to  convey  to  the  hearers 
that  reference  is  had  to  Jesus,  leave  no  doubt  that  within 
both  the  Judean  and  Hellenistic  Christianity  it  was  inter- 
preted as  positively  bearing  on  the  coming  of  Jesus.  That 
both  those  relations  of  Acts  are  not  purposely  fabricated 
by  its  author,  but  are  genuine  expressions  of  Jewish 
Christianity,  which  originally  received  that  notion  directly 
from  the  mouth  of  Jesus  himself,  may  be  further  proved 
from  the  Clementine  Homilies,  iii.  53.  There  the  declara- 
tion is  imputed  to  Jesus:  "  I  am  he  of  whom  Moses 
prophesied  saying,  'A  prophet,  etc.'"  These  are  traces 
indisputably  pointing  back  to  Jesus  as  the  author  of  the 
claim,  that  Moses  had  in  that  passage  foretold  his  com- 
ing as  '  the  prophet,'  that  is,  as  his  only  real,  spiritual 
successor.  As  '  the  prophet '  ^esus  would  naturally  apply 
to  himself  the  direction  given  in  Deut.  ib.  vv.  15,  19,  that 
the  people  have  on  pain  of  Divine  punishment,  to  listen  to 
his  announcements  and  dippositions.     It  is  worthy  of  notice 


156      *  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

that  Rabbinism  had,  in  its  comment  upon  this  Mosaical 
injunction,  advanced  the  proposition,  that  a  truly  accredited 
prophet  of  the  future  must  find  a  ready  hearing,  even  if  he 
should  demand  of  the  people  a  direct  transgression  of  any 
of  the  Mosaic  ordinances,  idolatry  only  excepted;  see  Sifre, 
Deut.,  sect.  175,  and  B.  Synhedrin  f.  90.  Whether  this  con- 
struction was  already  in  Jesus'  time  Rabbinically  put  on 
that  Scriptural  injunction,  we  do  not  know.  But  it  is 
certainly  very  likely  that  Jesus,  having  once  fairly  asserted 
the  distinction  of  being  the  predicted  prophet,  will  of  his 
own  mind  have  interpreted  it  in  that  sense.  In  connection 
with  it  he  may  also  have  claimed  the  power,  as  emanating 
to  him  from  the  Deity,  of  changing  Mosaic  laws. 

We  suggest  that  he  gradually  progressed  from  the  pre- 
tension of  being  a  prophet  to  that  of  himself  representing 
the  prophet  proper.  The  Jewish  people  at  large  must,  from 
various  indications,  have  in  the  century  of  Jesus  been  much 
disposed  to  recognize  miracle-workers  as  prophets.  We 
know  that  the  olden  Rabbis  would  frown  down  any  attempt 
of  individuals  pretending  the  gift  of  prophecy  or  the  pos- 
session of  the  holy  spirit.  They  firmly  held  that  with 
Malachi  prophecy  had  ceased,  and  was  never  afterwards 
Divinely  re-instituted.  This  view  was  evidently  main- 
tained also  by  the  author  of  the  first  book  of  Maccabees, 
who  wrote  in  John  Hyrcanus'  time  ;  see  ib.  ix.  27,  also  iv. 
46,  and  xiv.  41,  and  Grimm's  commentary  in  loco.  But 
different  it  was  with  the  common  people,  especially  the 
credulous  part  of  them.  Miracles  were  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  Jewish  people  regarded  as  a  prominent  signa- 
ture of  a  prophet.  Scripture  itself  had  variously  produced 
and  confirmed  such  perception.  Whatever  the  mediaeval 
religious  philosopher,  Maimoni,  has  to  argue  against  the 
supposition  that  mere  wonder-working  and  the  realization 
of  predictions  mark  the  faculty  and  calling  of  a  prophet 
(Introduction  to  Zeraim),  it  cannot  be  denied  that  practic- 
ally the  common  Israelites  of  old,  and  those  of  the  century 
of  Jesus  in  particular,  found  in  miracle-working  of  a  Jewish 
monotheist  the  chief  mark  of  a  prophet.  Apparently  had 
thaumaturgy    largely    flourished,  and    prophetic  claimants 


THE   SABBATH    IN    IHSTORV.  157 

had  found  easy  credence,  in  that  century.  Josephus  was 
most  lavish  in  awarding  the  degree  of  prophet  to  promi- 
nent persons.  He  credited  John  Hyrcanus  with  the  pro- 
phetic gift  ;  Wars.  i.  2,  8,  comp.  Ant.  xiii.  lO,  7.  Even  of 
the  Pharisees  as  a  class  he  asserts  that  "they  were  believed 
to  have  the  foreknowledge  of  things  to  come  by  Divine 
inspiration  ;  1.  c.  xvii,  2,4.  That  in  the  mystic  circle  of  the 
Essenes  and  kindred  ascetics,  with  which  class  John  the 
Baptist  and  Jesus  had  at  all  events  some  connection, 
prophecy  played  an  integrant  p^rt,  is  well  known  ;  see 
Wars.  i.  3,  5,  Ant.  xv.  10,  5. 

It  was  mainly  miracle-working  that  readily  won  for  those 
saints  the  title  of  prophets.  John  the  Baptist  secured  it 
from  his  followers  (Matt.  xvi.  14J.  from  other  Jewish  people 
(ib.  xiv.  5;  xxi.  26),  as  also  in  a  prominent  degree  from 
Jesus  himself  (ib.  xi.  9).  And  this  for  no  other  cause  than 
the  performance  of  "mighty  works"  (see  ib.  xiv.  2).  Jesus, 
too,  aimed  to  signalize  himself  by  miraculous  exploits  as 
possessed  of  the  prophetical  holy  spirit.  His  Galilean 
adherents  were  drawn  to  him  by  the  fame  of  his  miraculous 
power  (Matt.  xi.  8,  26,  31,  33),  a  fame  that  had  spread  even 
far  beyond  Galilee,  in  all  directions  (ib.  iv.  23-25).  People 
would  give  him  the  designation  of  prophet,  or  of  one  of  the 
olden  prophets  revived  (ib.  xvi.  14).  As  the  prophet  of 
Nazareth  he  was  yet  distinguished  by  the  multitude  toward 
the  end  of  his  life  (ib.  xxi.  ii).  And  the  immediately  sub- 
sequent Christianity  glorified  him  as  "a  man  approved  of 
God  by  miracles  and  wonders  and  signs"  (Acts  ii.  22). 

That  it  was  not  difficult  for  Jesus  to  promote  himself 
from  the  once  acknowledged  distinction  of  prophet  to  the 
highest  rank  of  the  Mosaically  predicted  prophet,  caa 
easily  be  perceived.  We  suggest  that  he  resorted  to  this 
superior  claim  mainly,  to  assuage  the  consciences  of  those 
who,  while  they  were  inclined  to  accept  his  Messiahdom, 
were  yet  too  much  absorbed  by  the  attendance  to  the  mul- 
tifarious ceremonial  rites  of  Judaism,  such  as  the  written 
Law  had  prescribed  and  tradition  established,  to  give  the 
Messianic  questions  that  undivided  solicitous  devotion, 
which  he  demanded  as  so  needful   in   the  face  of  the  k'ng- 

(3) 


158  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

dom  of  Heaven.  He  had  to  reassure  their  scrupling-  minds, 
that  ritual  observances  were  not  all-important,  as  they 
believed,  but  were  only  secondary,  in  view  of  the  necessity 
to  attend  to  matters  pertaining  to  that  kingdom.  He,  as 
'the  prophet,'  had,  moreover — so  he  may  have  argued — the 
inspired  authority  to  change  the  Mosaic  Law  and  intro- 
duce modified  and  partly  new  rules  of  conscientious  life, 
fitted  for  the  Messianic  period.  He  was  doubtless  cautious 
in  advancing  this  transcendent  claim,  uttering  it  perhaps 
only  to  his  most  intimate  disciples,  Peter,  James,  and  John, 
or  yet,  besides,  to  the  rest  of  the  twelve  select  apostles. 


CHAPTER   X. 


JESUS'  INDIFFERENT  TREATMENT  OF  CEREMONIAL  RELIGION 
OWING  PERHAPS  ALSO  TO  SOME  PECULIAR  MESSIANIC 
TRADITIONS  AND  POPULAR  NOTIONS. 

More  openly  he  may  have  reflected  upon  the  topic,  that 
the  Mosaic  Law  would  of  itself  cease  in  the  times  of  Mes- 
siah,— his  own  times,  as  he  pretended.  It  is  not  at  all 
unlikely  that  in  mystical  circles  some  such  notion  had 
gained  ground.  How  it  did,  is  not  easy  to  ascertain.  Per- 
haps that  it  was  worked  out  from  Jer.  xxxi.  31,  where  a 
new  covenant  is  spoken  of  by  the  prophet,  although  there 
was  not  the  least  warrant  for  the  construction  of  this  verse 
in  the  sense  of  the  abrogation  of  the  anciently  given  Law. 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  1 59 

That  no  alteration  of  the  Torah  was  implied  in  those  words 
of  Jeremiah,  is  surely  evident  enough  from  the  subsequent 
verse  33.  Yet  whoever  has  noticed  the  loose  method  of 
Scripture  exposition  in  N.  T.  passages,  will  not  find  it 
strange  that  the  true  literal  sense  of  that  announcement 
was  not  consulted  by  Messiah-enthusiasts.  However 
remote  the  relation  of  an  agreeable  theory  might  be  to  a 
Scripture  text,  it  was  yet  without  any  scruple  accommo- 
dated to  it,  and  made  to  indicate,  or  at  any  rate  intimate, 
that  theory.  Moreover,  it  has  to  be  mentioned  that  even 
in  orthodox  Jewish  spheres  the  presumption  that  in  the 
Messianic  era  the  Mosaic  ordinances  would  be  invalidated, 
had  some  adherents.  The  proposition  that  "in  the  Mes- 
sianic future  the  commands  of  the  Pentateuch  would  no 
more  be  valid,"  is,  it  is  true,  only  made  as  a  premise,  in  B. 
Niddah  f  61.  But  the  very  attempt  at  premising  it  shows, 
that  there  was  some  relative  tradition  back  of  it.  Possibly 
this  tradition  had  its  origin  in  the  same  interpretation  of 
the  before-quoted  verse  of  Jeremiah,  which,  it  may  be,  was 
put  on  it  also  by  Jesus. 

There  is  another  passage,  occurring  in  the  Yalkut  on  Isa., 
sect.  296,  that  comes  under  this  category:  "God  sits  in 
Paradise,  meditating  on  a  new  Torah,  which  He  will  reveal 
through  the  Messiah."  Such  remarks,  perhaps  never  earn- 
estly meant  by  those  uttering  them,  may  nevertheless  have 
passed  into  the  phraseology  of  the  common  people,  and 
this  in  centuries  much  anterior  to  that  collection.  They 
may  in  particular  have  been  ventilated  in  the  Herodian 
period,  in  which  the  Messianic  expectations  were  aroused 
to  the  highest  pitch.  Is  it,  therefore,  not  plausible,  that 
Jesus,  even  without  emphasizing  his  prophetic  authority 
against  the  further  obligation  of  the  Mosaic  ritual,  improved 
those  vague  and  stray  views,  to  the  end  that  his  followers 
might  be  relieved  of  the  anxiety  of  conscience  for  a  period- 
ical neglect  of  various  religious  observances.-* 

We  have  even  some  direct  evidence  that  he  limited  the 
obligation  of  the  Law  to  the  Messianic  term.  The  phrase 
"Till  heaven  and  earth  pass  away,"  expressive  of  the  dura- 
tion of  the  Law  (Matt.  v.    18),   we   can  fairly  construe  as 


l6o  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

chosen  by  him  to  indicate  his  own  conception  of  its  limited 
permanence,  a  limitation  which  was  by  his  own  Messiah- 
pretension  implicitly  given  out  to  be  then  imminent.^ ^  We 
might  also  pertinently  adduce  Luke  xvi.  i6:  "The  law 
and  the  prophets  (were)  until  John,"  to  prove  that  Jesus 
believed  and  declared  the  validity  of  the  Mosaic  Law  as 
expired  with  the  inauguration  of  the  Messianic  kingdom,  in 
which  John  was  the  first  and  he  the  second  factor,  had  we 
not  the  following  objections  to  the  authenticity  of  this  pas- 
sage. First,  the  sentence  excites  our  doubt  on  account  of 
the  Pauline,  and,  therefore,  dnti-Law  authorship,  of  that 
gospel.  Secondly,  the  subsequent  verse,  17,  so  flagrantly 
contradicts  the  sentiment  of  the  temporal  limitation 
of  the  jiLaw  to  John's  preaching,  expressed  in  the  pre- 
ceding, that  we  have  necessarily  to  assume  a  garbling  pro- 
cess to  have  got  hold  of  the  entire  context,  a  process  sufifi- 
ciently  evidenced,  besides,  by  the  vv.  17  and  18,  when  we 
compare  them  with  Matt.  v.  18,  32.  The  supposition  that 
garbling  occurred  in  this  context  becomes,  thirdly,  rather 
imperative,  when  we  hold  over  against  Luke's  assertion  in 
V.  16,  the  parallel  in  Matt.  xi.  13,  which  the  Pauline  author 
unquestionably  left  incomplete  in  copying  from  his  source, 
by  dropping  the  verb  "prophesied."^** 


CHAPTER  XI. 


JESUS'  POSITION  ON  THE   SABBATH— HIS   TWO  SABBATH 
CONTROVERSIES. 

The  reader  will,  we  hope,  pardon  us  for  making  him  fol- 
low us  through  the  length  of  all  the  foregoing  discussions, 
in  which  our  main  subject  had  partly  to  retreat  before  the 
general  question  of  Jesus'  estimation  of  ceremonial 
Mosaism.  But  they  had  in  our  opinion  to  be  premised,  in 
order  to  afford  a  better  understanding  of  his  particular 
position  on  the  Sabbath.  This  we  will  now  proceed  to  dis- 
cuss in  detail. 

There  are  some  Sabbath  controversies'*^  which  he  is 
reported  to  have  had  with  the  Pharisees,*  ^  only  two  of 
which  are  related  in  the  most  reliable  gospel,  that  of  Mat- 
thew. Keim  notes  only  these  two  as  historical.  They  are 
those  about  the  plucking  of  ears  of  corn  by  his  apostles, 
and  the  healing  of  the  man  with  a  withered  hand,  on  the 
Sabbath.  Whether  the  two  events  occurred  on  one  Sab- 
bath, and  directly  after  each  other,  as  Matt.  xii.  represents 
it  (it  is  uncertain  whether  Mark  intended  to  connect  both 
cases  as  to  time,  the  word  "again"  in  iii.  i,  making  it 
doubtful  whether  immediate  succession  was  meant  by  the 
writer),  or  on  two  different  Sabbaths,  as  Luke  vi.  i,  6  pro- 
duces it  (Keim  approves  the  latter;  see  his  Introduction 
to  vol.  HI.),  will  forever  remain  doubtful.  Keim  in  prefer- 
ring Luke's  relation  surely  knew  no  more  about  it  than 
any  other  reader  of  the  extant  gospels."*^ 

We  will  follow  the  order  in  which  the  gospels  introduce 
the  disputes,  and  start  with  that  on  the  plucking  by  the 
apostles  of  the  ears  of  corn,  when  they  were  once  "an  hun- 
gred"  on  a  Sabbath  day.  This  happened  according  to 
Keim  (1.  c.  iii.  358)  earlier  in  time  than  the  other.  It 
occurred,  as  he  further  proposes  (ib.  p.  363),  during  the 
first  months  of  his  ministry,  about  Easter  (Passover).'*'* 


l62  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

To  cut  (katsats  in  Hebrew)  or  tear  off  (talash)  from  a 
tree  or  plant  rooted  in  the  ground  on  the  Sabbath,  was  by 
the  Rabbinical  doctors  judged  to  be  a  Mosaically  prohib- 
ited manual  occupation;  the  former  was  declared  a  chief 
labor,  the  latter  its  derivate.  On  this  derivative  kind  of 
labor,  see  Mishnah  B.  Sabb.  f.  95  and  103,  and  the  Boraitha 
there.  To  invest  this  prohibition  with  a  more  direct  Scrip- 
tural authority,  some  later  Rabbis  attempted  to  account  the 
Sabbath  breaking  of  the  gatherer  of  sticks  (Numb.  xv.  32) 
as  having  consisted  in  pulling  off  limbs  or  twigs  from  a 
tree  or  shrub.  The  case  of  the  apostles  evidently  came,  in 
the  mind  of  the  rebuking  Pharisees,  under  this  category. 
According  to  Luke  who  adds,  that  the  apostles  rubbed  the 
ears  in  their  hands  (vi.  i),  they  would,  besides,  have  made 
themselves  guilty  of  yet  another  Sabbath  violation.  For 
in  the  Rabbinical  view  the  husking  of  grain  was  a  sort  of 
labor  derivative  from  threshing  (see  Tosaf.  B.  Sabb.  f.  73), 
which  latter  was  counted  among  the  thirty-nine  chief 
labors.  Mark  ii.  23  sq.,  has  presented  the  event  with  such 
brevity  that  one  would,  without  the  aid  of  the  other  Synop- 
tics, be  at  a  loss  to  learn  from  v.  23  alone,  whether  he  laid 
the  stress  of  the  questionable  act  of  the  apostles  on  their 
making  the  way  in  the  cornfield  by  plucking  the  ears  (with 
the  stalks,  perhaps),  or  on  their  doing  the  latter  for  the 
sake  of  allaying  their  hunger. 

Jesus,  in  rebutting  the  charge  of  Sabbath  breaking  by 
his  apostles  (Matt.  xii.  1-8)  proved  himself  a  real  Rabbin- 
ical dialectician  (see  Geiger,  'Sadducees  and  Pharisees,'  p. 
31).  In  his  plea  he  points  out  David's  using,  in  the 
extremity  of  hunger,  for  himself  and  his  men  the  loaves  of 
shew-bread  that  had  been  removed  from  the  sacred  table, 
to  be  eaten  by  priests  alone  (r  Sam.  xxi.).  By  this  anal- 
ogy he  aims  to  give  support  to  the  theory,  that  in  a  case  of 
distress  a  layman  may  presume  to  do  what  is  ordinarily 
permitted  to  priests  only.  With  this  theory,  unexpressed 
yet  foremost  in  his  mind,  he  proceeds  to  draw  the  final 
conclusion,  applicable  to  the  case  in  dispute.  Priests,  he 
went  on  to  argue  (Matt.  ib.  v.  5),  may  freely  attend  to  the 
Sabbath  sacrifices,  the  Law  permitting,  nay,  commanding 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  163 

it.  If,  then,  he  meant  to  urge,  priests  may  carry  on  man- 
ual occupations  prohibited  to  other  Israelites  on  the  Sab- 
bath (slaying  an  animal  was  accounted  one  of  the  thirty- 
nine  chief  labors),  why  should  a  lay  person  not  be  equal  to 
a  Temple  functionary  in  so  far  that  he  may,  in  a  condition 
of  pinching  hunger,  do  some  work  otherwise  ui'.lawful,  but 
which,  from  the  analogy  of  David's  case  who  would  in  a 
state  of  starvation  presume  to  be  as  privileged  as  a  priest, 
ought  to  become  likewise  permissible  to  every  other  Isra- 
elite, reduced  to  such  extremity  .''  Why,  therefore, — this 
was  the  implication  of  his  argument, — should  my  apostles 
not  be  as  reproachless  for  their  act  of  necessity  as  David 
was  in  his .'' 

Thus  far  Jesus  himself  used  a  Phariseic-Rabbinical 
method  of  arguing.  Not  only  in  form  he  had  in  that 
argument  not  removed  himself  from  Rabbinism,  even  as  to 
its  tenor  he  had  scarcely  forsaken  its  wonted  scope.  For 
it,  too,  had  made  marked  allowances  for  cases  of  necessity. 
Nor  even  had  the  sentence  attached  in  Mark  ii.  27,  "The 
Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  Sabbath," 
any  direct  marks  of  un-Jewish  intent,  so  that  the  Pharisees 
might  have  become  indignant  at  its  use.  Phariseism  itself 
— later  Rabbinism  at  least — had  formed  and  employed  the 
identical  sentence,  though  for  a  different  object.  It  was, 
to  support  the  old  and  firmly  established  rule,  that  "to  save 
human  life  and  rescue  it  from  danger,  the  Sabbath  has  to 
give  way"  (see  Mechilta  cd.  Weiss  f  no,  and  B.  Yoma  f. 
85).  The  doctors  putting  it  forth  in  the  cited  passages  did 
so  in  consequence  of  a  forced  interpretation  put  on  the 
word  Idchem  "unto  you,"  in  the  verse,  "And  ye  shall  keep 
the  Sabbath,  for  it  is  holy  unto  you"  (Ex.  xxxi.  14).  This 
word,  though  it  is  by  no  means  superfluous  or  exceptional 
in  the  context  in  which  it  stands,  was  yet,  in  the  manner 
of  olden  Rabbinical  exegesis,  pressed  to  suggest  the  sent- 
ence, "The  Sabbath  is  given  to  you,  but  you  are  not  given 
to  the  Sabbath."  This  sentence  was  subsequently  pro- 
pounded to  furnish  a  Scriptural  support  to  that  rule,  which 


164  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

had  perhaps  since  days  immemorial  entered  of  itself  into 
practical  Judaism,  and,  for  aught  we  know,  never  met  with 
the  slightest  objection,  even  from  the  most  rigid  Sabbath 
observer. 

The  difference  regarding  this  sentence  between  ortho- 
dox Judaism  and  Jesus  was,  however,  that  in  the  former 
incidents  of  hunger  were  never  thought  of  being  brought 
within  its  scope.  It  was  restricted  to  instances  in  which 
danger  to  life  was  feared,  if  a  certain  labor  prohibited  on 
the  Sabbath  would  be  omitted  toward  the  imperilled  per- 
son. But  yet,  while  the  Phariseic  opponents  of  Jesus  must 
have  seriously  dissented  from  him  as  to  his  license  in 
applying  that  sentence  to  cases  of  hunger  as  well,  they 
could  nevertheless  have  had  some  indulgence  for  it,  had  he 
not  so  flagrantly,  and  in  such  an  unheard-of  manner, 
aggravated  it  by  adding  the  assertion:  "Therefore  the 
Son  of  man  is  Lord  also  of  the  Sabbath"  (Mark  ii.  28;  see 
also  Matt.  ib.  8,  in  whose  gospel,  by  the  way,  the  other 
sentence  "The  Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  etc.,"  is  want- 
ing, and  Luke  vi.  5).  That  this  self-elating  assertion  is 
genuine,  there  can  be  no  doubt.  By  it  he  shows  himself 
not  only  removed  from  orthodox  Phariseic  Judaism,  but 
most  decidedly  cut  loose  from  the  cardinal  principles  of 
positive  Judaism,  as  professed  by  each  of  its  sects  with 
deep  conviction  and  unshaken  faith.  The  opponents  must 
have  been  shocked  in  their  inmost  souls  on  hearing  him 
put  forward  such  an  enormous  vaunt.  Were  they  to  inter- 
pose a  counter-argument  to  such  a  daring  claim  of  divine 
authority.''  They  must  have  felt  too  keen  a  dismay  to 
reply  to  him  at  all  any  more. 

That  he  should  have  had  no  other  intention  with  his  self- 
appellation  "Son  of  man,"  than  to  generalize  from  himself, 
the  typical  son  of  man, — the  Messiah, — to  all  people  as  sons 
or  children  of  men,  we  can  not  possibly  accept  with  Geiger 
(as  above)."* ^  No,  the  impression  which  the  assertion  that 
the  Son  of  man  was  Lord  also  of  the  Sabbath  must  have 
made    on    the    expostulating    Pharisees,    was    certainly   an 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  165 

entirely  different  one.  It  was  no  other  than  that  he  repre- 
sented himself  as  the  supernaturally  endowed  Messiah, 
and,  perhaps,  'the  prophet,'  who  could  practically,  if  he  had 
a  mind  or  saw  the  necessity  of  it,  abolish  even  the  Sabbath. 
That  he  laid  the  stress  of  his  assertion  not,  as  Geiger 
proposes,  on  his  human  character,  in  which  indeed  all  his 
coevals  were  his  equals,  but  on  his  pretended  divine-like 
Messiahdom,  as  adopted  from  Daniel,  Enoch,  and  some 
similar  mystical  books,  becomes  the  more  evident  as  we 
hold  fti  view  the  other  self-elating  utterance  which  he, 
according  to  Matt.  ib.  v.  6,  made  on  the  same  occasion. 
He  argues  there:  "But  I  say  unto  you  that  one  (or,  some- 
thing) greater  than  the  Temple  is  here."^'^  He  doubtless 
insinuated  thereby  that,  standing  in  dignity  and  sacredness 
higher  than  the  Temple,  he  could  also,  if  he  so  pleased,  do 
away  its  service.  This  interpretation  is  by  no  means 
extravagant.  It  is  fully  borne  out  by  the  trend  of  his 
thought,  expressed  on  another  occasion  with  regard  to  the 
Temple.  When  he  was,  after  his  violent  proceedings  in  its 
court,  questioned,  "by  what  authority  he  was  doing  these 
things.'*" — by  which  things  those  arbitrary  and  domineering 
proceedings  were  surely  meant  alongside  of  his  other  inno- 
vations— he  retorted  with  the  counter-question:  "The 
baptism  of  John  whence  was  it  ?  from  heaven  or  of  men  ? 
etc."  (Matt.  xxi.  23-25).  In  this  rejoinder  is  certainly 
implied  the  justification  for  the  assumption  of  his  own 
authority.  He  doubtless  meant  to  insinuate  that  his 
authority  emanated  from  God,  as  well  as  John's.  In  both 
the  foregoing  instances  concerning  the  Temple  we,  then 
see  Jesus  asserting  an  authority  of  a  divine  character,  with 
which  he  claimed  to  be  vested,,  in  superiority  above  all 
other  men.  We  meet  with  the  same  self-exaltation  in  his 
affirmation,  "the  Son  of  man  has  power  on  earth  to  forgive 
sins"  (Matt.  ix.  6),  which  was  interconnected  with  his 
announcement  of  his  judicial  power  over  all  nations,  to  be 
exhibited  at  his  second  coming,  on  the  Judgment  da}^  (ib, 
XXV.  31  sq.).  A  divine  lordship  he  surely  pretended  to  as 
immanent    in    his     Messiahdom.     He    deduced     it    rather 


i66  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

explicitly  from  his  stock  sentence  of  Ps.  ex.  i,  in  his  Mes- 
sianic controversy  with  the  Pharisees  (Matt.  xxii.  41-46)^ 
on  which  occasion  he  geive  them  also  plainly  enough  to 
understand  that  he  claimed  to  be  the  son  of  God. 

All  these  instances  prove  forcibly  that  Jesus  intended  to 
put  forth  claims  of  divinity.  We  have  disserted  on  this 
subject  at  large  in  our  work  on  the  Mineans.  Here  a  suc- 
cinct mention  must  be  sufficient. 

As  to  his  assertion  to  be  the  Lord  of  the  Sabbath,  it 
could  certainly  impress  those  who  had  called  him  to 
account  for  countenancing  its  violation  by  his  apostles,  not 
differently  from  his  other  pretensions  of  spiritual  magni- 
tude. What  else  could  they  judge  from  it  but  that  he 
declared  the  Sabbath,  by  the  bulk  of  the  Jewish  nation 
believed  to  be  Divinel}'  instituted,  thrown  at  his  mercy,  to 
be  abrogated,  or  at  any  rate  modified,  by  his  dictate — for 
those  at  least  who  had  joined  themselves  to  him  and 
believed  in  his  miracles  and  mission  .-*  Nay,  the  ultimate 
inference  which  the  simple  Rabbis  of  Capernaum  who  ques- 
tioned him  have  drawn  from  it,  was  possibly  no  other  than 
that  he  not  only  usurped  a  superior  authority  over  the  Sab- 
bath as  received  from  the  Deity,  but  one  inherent  in  him- 
self as  God's  rival  and  opposite.  For,  they  may  have 
reasoned,  one  pretending  to  a  superiority  above  the  Sab- 
bath, must  at  the  same  time  think  himself  exalted  above 
Jehovah  who  had  commanded  its  observance,  else  he  can- 
not put  forward  a  derogatory  sentence  like  that. 

It  may  not  be  amiss  to  quote  here  the  view  of  Salva- 
dor, 'Jesus  Christ,'  ii.  80-8 1 :  "If  one  placed  himself."  argues 
he,  "above  the  institution  proper;  if,  as  Jesus  did,  one  pro- 
claimed himself  the  absolute  Lord  of  the  Sabbath,  this  was 
an  attack  upon  the  Law  by  overthrowing  one  of  its  corner- 
stones. In  fact,  this  was  an  elevation  of  one's  self  above 
the  God  of  the  Jews,  or,  at  least,  a  pretension  to  be  His 
equal."  Even  Keim  who  vindicates  Jesus  throughout  his 
whole  work  against  the  presumption  of  divinity,  admits  "as 
early  indications  of  his  higher  nature  the  calling  himself 
greater  than  the  temple,  a  lord  of  the  Sabbath,  and  one 
who  was  authorized  to  exercise  the  divine  prerogative  of 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  1 67 

forgiving  sins"  (iii.  p.  78).  On  this  last  claim  of  authority 
by  Jesus  that  author  observes  (ib.  p.  367),  that  the  Phari- 
sees found  it  to  be  "his  most  flagrant  breach  of  the  Law. 
Here  he  had  done  violence  not  only  to  a  divine  ordinance, 
but  to  the  personal  majesty,  the  sovereign  prerogative  of 
God.  It  seemed  to  dart  on  them  like  a  light  (we  can 
afford  to  allow  for  this  Gentile  Christian  sarcastic  hit !) 
that  the  principle  upon  which  he  as  transgressor  of  the 
Law  acted,  was  contempt  of  God,  blasphemy  against  God, 
heathen  denial  of  God."  Keim  further  concedes  that  "the 
Son  of  man  (which  title  he  had  assumed  already  in  the 
early  part  of  his  ministry)  is  in  the  greater  number  of  pas- 
sages in  which  he  occurs,  plainly  an  exalted  being."  Let 
us  ask,  if  a  Christian  critic  of  the  nineteenth  century  could 
not  help  discovering  in  those  instances  of  Jesus'  self-asser- 
tion the  claim  of  a  Jiigher  nature  and  of  an  exalted  being, 
were  the  Rabbinical  questioners  of  his  own  time  expected 
to  find  less  in  them  }  Scarcely  so.  And  if  we  analyze 
those  veiled  phrases,  what  result  will,  if  we  are  candid, 
meet  us  }  None  other  than  that  they  are  high-wrought 
paraphrases  of  divinity.  We,  at  least,  are  unable  to  dis- 
cern in  the  concept  of  a  nature  higher  than  the  human,  and 
of  a  being  exalted  above  all  other  human  beings,  anything 
else  than  that  of  divinity.  Those  Rabbis  of  Capernaum 
will  then,  with  their  ready  comprehension  of  Jesus'  lan- 
guage, have  promptly  recognized  in  him  a  most  radical 
assaulter  of  the  principles  of  Judaism  already  at  the  early 
period  of  his  public  preaching,  ere  yet  he  had  announced 
himself,  before  the  Jews  of  all  classes,  as  the  designated 
judge  and  ruler  of  all  nations,  or  openly  assumed  the  addi- 
tional title  "son  of  God"  (on  the  latter  see  Matt.  xxvi.  64  ; 
Mark  xiv.  62  ;  John  xix.  7),  which  title  he  had  already  be- 
fore his  trial,  in  his  argument  against  the  Pharisees  on  the 
descent  of  the  Messiah  (Matt.  xxii.  41-415),  perceptibly 
enough  intimated  as  belonging  to  him. 

We  will  now  turn  to  the  second  controversy  on  healing 
on  the  Sabbath.  Jesus  is  reported  to  have  been  asked  in 
the  synagogue  of  Capernaum,  "Is  it  lawful  to  heal  on  the 
Sabbath  day  T  (Matt.  xii.  10.)     The  interrogators  were  of 


l68  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

course  again  the  Pharisees  ;  see  ib.  v.  14.  This  evangel- 
ical writer  held  them,  moreover,  so  strongly  in  his  thoughts 
that  he  characterized,  though  more  in  passing,  even  that 
synagogue  as  a  sectarian  one  (ib.  v.  9),  whereas  it  was 
surely  assigned  for  the  worship  of  the  entire  Jewish  popu- 
lation. Jesus  is  said  to  have  rebutted  the  query  by  the 
axiom  that  "it  is  lawful  to  do  good  on  the  Sabbath  day" 
(ib.  12;  Mark  iii.  i  sq.  has  an  entirely  different  version  of 
the  proceedings).  This  axiom  is  placed  at  the  end  of  his 
argument.  It  is  preceded  by  an  illustration  from  practical 
life  (vv.  II,  12),  to  bring  it  home  to  them  with  as  deep  a 
sense  of  confusion  as  possible.  The  illustration  is  of  a  case 
in  which,  as  he  suggested,  themselves  would  disregard  the 
Sabbatic  injunction  without  any  scruple.  Now  we  hold  it 
quite  possible  that  Jesus  argued  with  the  questioners  from 
the  view  of  mercy  due  to  the  sick  and  the  suffering,  as  we 
find  it  in  the  gospel  account.  But  the  statement  with 
which  Matthew  winds  the  story  up,  that  "the  Pharisees 
went  out,  and  took  counsel  against  him,  how  they  might 
destroy  him,"  we  have  to  pronounce,  to  give  it  very  mildly, 
as  a  bold  exaggeration.  The  Pharisees  were  positively  no 
such  monsters  as  to  try  to  kill  a  man  or  have  him  killed 
for  making  another  man's  withered  hand  whole  on  the  Sab- 
bath. That  writer  evidently  calculated  on  the  credulity 
and  ignorance  of  the  generality  of  his  readers.  For  all  his 
fairly  informed  Jewish  contemporaries  knew,  as  every  one 
else,  even  slightly  versed  in  Rabbinical  legislation,  must 
know,  that  healing  the  sick  on  the  Sabbath  was  among  the 
learned  Pharisees  held  only  as  a  preventive  restraint,  which 
no  one  ever  thought  of  including  among  the  Mosaically 
prohibited  labors,  and  thus  holding  a  perpetrator  legally 
liable  to  capital  penalty.  Healing  was  only  Rabbinically 
forbidden  on  the  Sabbath,  and  that  with  the  preventive 
object,  that  one  might  not  ultimately  go  and  commit  the 
trespass  of  crushing  medicinal  roots  or  herbs  into  powder. 
This  would  be  a  real  labor,  equal  to  grinding,  which,  again, 
was  counted  among  the  thirty-nine  chief  occupations  inter- 
dicted on  the  Sabbath. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  169 

Secondly,  we  have  to  object  against  that  statement  that, 
while  the  prohibition  of  healing  on  the  Sabbath  was  doubt- 
less rigidly  heeded  in  Jesus'  time,  it  is  yet  incredible  that 
the  Pharisees  should  have  taken  occasion  from  the  cure 
performed  by  him,  to  even  severely  persecute,  much  less  to 
destroy  him.  We  could  indeed  credit  it  if  the  writer  had 
intended  to  convey,  that  the  Pharisees  conspired  against 
him  for  his  pretense  of  supernatural  healing,  connected 
with  his  Messianic  claim,"* ^  independently  of  the  Sabbath. 
But  this  is  not  the  case. 

The  remonstrance  with  the  Pharisees  turns  here  on  the 
Sabbath-breaking  by  actual  healing,  and  not  on  a  myste- 
rious Messianic  cure  by  remission  of  sin,  as  we  find  it  in 
Matt.  ix.  1-6.  But  healing  on  the  Sabbath  in  a  desperate 
case  like  that  of  the  man  with  a  withered  hand,  could  not 
make  the  violator  liable  even  to  a  severe  animadversion 
from  the  Phariseic  doctors.  The  Rabbinical  prohibition  of 
healing  on  the  Sabbath  did  not  extend  to  any  case  of  sick- 
ness in  which  danger  to  life  was  to  be  feared,  if  medical 
application  were  omitted.  The  set  rule  among  the  Rabbis 
was,  that  no  Mosaic  command,  except  the  three  cardinal 
restraints  of  idolatry,  incest,  and  murder,  could  stand  in 
the  way  of  saving  life.  The  leading  view  among  the 
learned  Jews  was,  that  the  Divine  commands  were  not 
given  that  life  should  on  their  account  be  sacrificed  or 
jeopardized,  but  that,  on  the  contrary,  it  be  spared  and 
preserved.  They  referred  this  principle  to  Lev.  xviii.  5.  in 
the  latter  words  of  which  they  found  a  warrant  for  it.  The 
Sabbath  law,  sacred  and  inviolable  as  it  was,  should  yet 
not  interfere  where  human  life  was  at  stake.  There  was 
not  one  of  the  representative  Rabbis  of  antiquity  who  dif- 
fered from  this  view.  Those  of  the  first  and  second  centu- 
ries of  our  era  had  received  the  rule  that  "saving  life 
vacates  the  Sabath,"  from  former  ages,  and  were  all  agreed 
that  it  was  fair  and  perfectly  in  accord  with  the  spirit  of 
Judaism;  see  Mechilta  f.   no,   ed.   Weiss;   B.  Sabb.  f.  132; 


170  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

Tosifta  Sabb.  p.  134.  It  was  as  firmly  established  in 
orthodox  Judaism  as  that  circumcision  and  Temple  service 
should  put  aside  the  Sabbath  obligation  (this  appears  from 
Tosifta  1.  c). 

It  seems  to  us,  further,  that  the  Rabbis  had  not  at  all  an 
extreme  conception  of  what  was  to  be  called  "saving  life." 
Not  only  was  it  generally  understood  that  the  fear  of 
immediate  danger  was  sufficient  cause  for  setting  aside  the 
Sabbath  law  in  any  case  of  sickness  or  serious  accident, 
but  there  is  all  likelihood  that  even  where  the  danger  was 
only  indirect  or  remote,  its  fear  was  by  the  Rabbis  consid- 
ered a  justifiable  cause  for  breaking  the  Sabbath;  see  B. 
Sabbath  f.  128,  129.  Nay,  since  opinions  must  have  dif- 
fered then  on  what  was  a  real  dangerous  condition  (sak- 
kann),  as  they  necessarily  differ  at  all  times;  and,  further, 
since  we  know  from  the  Talmud  that  the  term  mesukkan 
"endangered"  was  applied  even  to  him  who  was  only  sickly 
(see  3.  Sabb.  f.  37),  we  have  to  declare  that  the  scope  of 
dangerousness,  on  the  ground  of  which  medical  assistance 
and  relief  was  allowed  to  be  administered  to  the  sick,  was 
rather  wide  with  the  pious  doctors  of  old.  Now  that  a 
man  with  a  withered  hand  fairly  came  under  the  head  of 
"dangerous,"  will  from  the  foregoing  appear  very  probable. 
To  treat  such  a  man  with  the  grounded  prospect  of  cure, 
the  learned  Jews  of  Jesus'  time  are  not  likelj'  to  have  held 
a  violation  of  the  traditional  restraint  of  healing  on  the 
Sabbath. 

Thirdly,  we  have  to  object  that,  since  his  pretended 
miraculous  cures,  whether  of  the  sick  or  the  possessed, 
were  of  a  magical  or,  to  give  it  more  euphemistically,  a 
psychical  nature,  produced  by  the  "holy  ghost  and  power" 
within  him  (Acts  x.  38),  and  resulting  from  his  mere  word 
of  mouth  (see  Matt.  viii.  8,  13.  16;  ix.  6.  7,  et  alias),  which 
was  often  preceded  or  attended  by  his  hand  touching  the 
sufferer  or  the  sufferer  touching  him  (ib.  viii.  3,  15;  ix.  29; 
xiv.  36,  et  alias), — and  surely  was  the  case  of  the  man 
with  a  withered  hand  not  intended  by  the  evangelist  to 
pass  as  other  than  a  spiritual  cure, — the  expostulation  of 
the  Pharisees  with  Jesus  for  a  cure  of  this  kind  performed 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  171 

on  the  Sabbath  is  very  problematic.  We  know  that 
the  olden  Rabbis  did  not  in  the  least  object  to  wearing 
magical  charms,  inscribed  with  Scripture  verses,  on  the 
Sabbath,  although  they  were  immediately  intended  as  a 
panacea  for  bodily  ailments  and  infirmities;  see  Mishnah 
B.  Sabb.  f.  60.  They  did  evidently  not  attach  to  any  mode 
of  spiritual  healing  the  apprehension  that  such  sani- 
tary process  might  lead  to  crushing  medicinal  substances. 
The  Phariseic  doctors  of  Jesus'  time  had,  we  may  fairly 
suppose,  no  different  view.  It  is  therefore  very  question- 
able that  they  should,  on  finding  him  about  to  execute  a 
psychical  cure  on  the  Sabbath,  have  called  him  to  account 
for  its  violation  by  it. 

Fourthly,  we  have  to  impugn  the  correctness  of  the  rela- 
tive account  given  by  Mark  iii.  4.  (It  is,  we  believe,  excus- 
able to  note  in  the  question  before  us,  this  evangelist, 
though  he  can  by  no  means  be  held  as  reliable  as.  Mat- 
thew.) He  adds:  "But  they  held  their  peace."  This 
assuredl}^  r»eans  that  the  Pharisees  were  disabled  by  the 
point-blank  shot  of  argument  hurled  at  them  by  Jesus. 
The  questioners,  the  implication  is,  were  so  dumbfounded 
that  they  could  not  reply  to  Jesus'  query:  "Is  it  lawful  on 
the  Sabbath  day  to  do  good,  or  to  do  harm  .''"  We,  how- 
ever, able  to  judge  of  the  Phariseic  temper  and  skill  in 
debating  by  many  examples  of  the  later  consentient 
Rabbis,  would  oppose  that  it  is  not  at  all  likely  that  the 
learned  remonstrators  felt  themselves  so  badly  discomfited 
by  the  question  of  Jesus,  that  they  held  ituseless  to  argue 
with  him  any  further.  We  have  to  insist  that,  if  the  gospel 
account  of  Jesus  using  that  plea  in  the  above  questioning 
form  of  an  aphorism  is  in  the  main  authentic,  they  were 
not  at  all  argued  down  by  it,  but  had  enough  courage  and 
presence  of  mind  left  to  meet  him  in  his  argument  in  this 
wise:  "Yes,  indeed.  We  too  allow  doing  good  on  the 
Sabbath.  It  is  with  us  a  dispensatory  rule  to  remove  on 
the  Sabbath  cases  and  boxes  filled  with  any  articles  set 
apart  for  use  on  working  days,  if  they  obstruct  a  place 
where  traveling  poor  are  to  be  accommodated.  We  per- 
mit  this   freely,    though    we    otherwise    hold    burdensome 


172  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

exertions  unlawful  on  the  sacred  day  of  rest  (see  B.  Sabb. 
f.  126).  For  charity  stands  with  us  as  high  as  you  claim  it 
valued  by  yourself.  Furthermore,  though  we  are  ordina- 
rily very  strict  in  following  out  Isaiah's  admonition  (Isa. 
Iviii.  13),  to  'honor  the  Sabbath  by  not  following  our  own 
business,  etc.,'  allowing  no  talking  or  figuring  about  any  of 
our  secular  affairs,  we  yet  make  an  exception  with  objects 
of  charity.  We  declare  it  quite  proper  to  apportion 
amounts  of  benevolent  gifts  for  the  poor,  the  orphans,  and 
such  like  wretched  creatures  of  society  (see  B.  Sabb.  f  150; 
comp.  however  the  observation  of  Tosaf  ib.  on  the  division 
of  opinions  as  to  some  objects  of  charity).  We  also  permit 
several  things  needful  for  a  dead  person  to  be  done  on  the 
Sabbath,  which  are  otherwise  prohibited  (see  ib.  f  150, 
151),  for  we  value  charity  so  highly  that  we  extend  it  even 
to  the  dead  (comp.  Jer.  Peah,  f.  15)."  It  is  true,  the  fore- 
going, statutory  rules  occur  in  the  Rabbinical  literature  of 
an  epoch  much  ulterior  to  the  lifetime  of  Jesus.  Yet  we 
can  entertain  no  doubt  that  the  Phariseic  doctors  in  the 
latter's  time  thought  and  decreed  congenially  with  the 
Rabbinical  sages  of  the  second  century,  and  that  the  above 
dispensations  passed  current  already  with  them. 

Such  and  the  like  rejoinders,  we  should  think,  were 
readily  at  the  command  of  the  Phariseic  opponents  of 
Jesus,  so  that  Mark's  allegation,  "But  they  held  their' peace," 
must  appear  most  doubtful.  Nor  does  this  imputed  silence 
become  more  plausible  by  suggesting,  that  Mark  may  in 
his  mind  have  adverted  to  Jesus'  proposition  of  an  only 
sheep  having  fallen  into  a  pit  on  the  Sabbath  which,  while 
he  has,  in  his  effort  at  brevity  (that  Mark  had,  in  composing 
his  gospel,  the  object  of  abbreviation,  is  set  forth  at  length 
by  Strauss  1.  c.  i.  169,  seq.),  not  mentioned  it  in  his  version, 
is  yet  possible  to  have  been  in  his  thoughts,  being 
impressed  on  them  from  the  original  of  Matthew's  gospel, 
out  of  which  he  supposably  gathered  his  own  relative 
account.  According  to  Matthew,  Jesus  used  this  homely 
illustration  to  substantiate  his  argument  that  doing  good 
was  lawful  on  the  Sabbath.  If  it  could  be  supposed  that 
Mark  silently  adverted  to  it  when  he  made  the  assertion, 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  1/3 

that  the  Pharisees  held  their  peace,  we  would  have  to 
oppose  our  doubt  of  it  for  the  reason,  that  it  appears  from 
the  Talmud  that  the  learned  Rabbis — and  the  Pharisees  of 
Jesus'  time  presumably  as  well — had  not  at  all  held  it  as 
such  a  matter  of  course,  that  the  animal  was  permitted  to 
be  drawn  out  of  the  pit.  It  is  to  be  inferred  from  B.  Sab- 
bath f.  124,  that  they  would  only  hold  it  permissible,  if  it 
could  not  be  (ed  from  the  top,  so  that  it  might  be  kept  from 
the  pangs  of  starvation  for  the  rest  of  the  day.  Yet  when- 
ever this  was  possible,  they  will  have  insisted  that  the 
owner  must  wait  with  drawing  it  out  till  the  Sabbath  was 
over.  The  Phariseic  opponents  could  accordingly  have 
been  prompted  to  parry  the  stroke  aimed  at  them  by  Jesus' 
illustration  by  replying:  "No,  we  do  not  admit  that  your 
illustration  is  to  the  point.  We  firmly  maintain  that  our 
prohibition  of  needlessly  assuming  any  laborious  exertion 
on  the  Sabbath,  applies  even  to  the  case  of  an  only  sheep 
that  has  fallen  into  a  pit.  Only  that  our  pity  for  the  suffer- 
ing brutes — we  regard  even  the  prevention  of  cruelty  to 
and  suffering  of  them  as  a  Mosaical  and  Divine  command — 
bids  us  set  aside  the  consideration  of  laborious  exertion  on 
the  Sabbath.  When,  therefore,  the  animal  would  have  to 
starve  by  our  neglect  of  drawing  it  out,  we  allow  the  latter 
to  be  done.  But  when  there  is  a  chance  of  feeding  it  from 
the  top,  we  urge  that  it  be  left  in  its  place  till  after  the 
Sabbath." 

We  will  not  carry  our  criticism  any  further.  The  reader 
will  at  this  point  have  sufficiently  recognized  the  tendency 
of  the  evangelists  to  represent  the  Pharisees  who  had 
polemical  encounters  with  their  hero,  as  so  much  inferior 
to  him  in  the  power  of  argument,  and  as  unable  to  cope 
with  him  in  any  controversy.  They  must  in  any  case  have 
been  crushed  beneath  the  weight  of  his  argument,  and  he 
must  every  time  have  been  gloriously  triumphant — is  the 
uniform  verdict  of  the  gospel  writers,  bent  on  wreaking 
their  vengeance  on  the  antagonists  of  their  Master. 


(4 


CHAPTER  XII. 


THE   OTHER   FOUR   SABBATH   CONTROVERSIES   IN   THE  j 

GOSPELS.  i 

There  are  four  more  Sabbath  disputes  delivered  as  having     ; 
been  carried  on  between  Jesus  and  his  Jewish  opponents.     ■ 
Two  of  them,  belonging  to  the  author  of  the  fourth  gospel, 
seem  to  us,  however,  to  be  of  one  same  body  of  narrative, 
having  by  some  chance  been  disjointed.     Accordingly  there     ; 
would  in  fact  be  but  one  Johannine  Sabbath  controversy  to     j 
notice.     As  to  the  spittle  and  clay  story  in  ch.  ix.  of  the     \ 
fourth  gcspel,  it  can  of  course  not  be  accounted  a  contro- 
versy, and,  therefore,  not  be  ranged   under  the  above  head. 

Our  view  on  the  authenticity  of  these  controversies  will 
be  stated  severally  as  we  go  on  in   our  discussion.     Two  of 
them  occur  in  Luke  xiii.  10-17  and  xiv.  1-6.     In  the  latter 
place  the  Pauline  author    puts  in  the  mouth  of  Jesus  the      | 
identical  argument  which  Matthew  imputes  to  him  in  the     i 
case  previously  surveyed;  with  this  difference  only,  that  he     [ 
changed  the  sheep  to  an  ass  or  ox,  and  the  patient  treated     ' 
by  Jesus  to  one  sick  with  the  dropsy. 

It  seems  to  us  that  Luke  having  met  with  Jesus'  illustra- 
tion of  the  animal  fallen  into  a  pit  either  in  Matthew  or  in      j 
the  original  copy  common  to  both  evangelists,  liked  it  so     ' 
well  and  found  it  of  such  a  prolific  nature,  that  he  concluded 
on  weaving  it  into  two   separate  stories,  inventing  a  new     I 
one, — the  one  in  question, — in  which  another  instance  alike 
of  a  miraculous  cure  by  Jesus  and  of  the  discomfiture  of  the      ; 
Scribes    and  Pharisees  by  his  cogent  reasoning,  could   be 
given  to  the  believing  public. 

In  Luke's  other  case  of  Sabbath  healing,  that  of  a  woman 
with  "the  spirit  of  infirmity"  of  eight  years'  standing  (xiii. 
10-17),  Jesus  is  introduced  with   an    argument  of  defence,      ! 
also    taken    from    ordinary  experience,  but    of  a   different     "i 
nature  from  the  above.     It  is  to  be  inferred  from  its  repre-      j 
sentation  that  the  dispute  was  a  heated  one.     For  the  ruler      ; 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTOKV.  1 75 

of  the  synagogue  who  had  taken  decided  exception  to  the 
process  of  healing  going  on  on  the  Sabbath,  was  addressed 
by  Jesus  with  the  collective  taunt:  "Ye  hypocrites."  It 
goes  without  saying  that  "the  adversaries  were  put  to 
shame"  (v.  17)  in  this  encounter  as  well!  The  Pharisees 
were  a  set  of  antagonists  to  be  worsted  and  cowed,  and 
consequently  the  uniform  verdict  of  the  evangelists  was, 
that  they  were  shamefully  beaten,  whenever  they  dared  to 
remonstrate  \Yith  the  Master. 

Now  we  presume  to  doubt  the  truth  of  the  account  that 
the  adversaries  were  put  to  shame  by  the  illustration  held 
out  to  them  by  Jesus.  We  can  not  accept  it  as  reasonable 
that  they  were  totally  confounded  by  the  retort,  that  he 
might  as  well  perform  his  cures,  as  that  they  habitually 
"loose  their  domestic  animals  from  the  stall  and  lead  them 
away  to  watering"  on  the  Sabbath. 

The  divergence  between  both  propositions  was  doubtless 
so  great  in  their  mind,  that  they  were  most  apt  to 
promptly  rejoin:  "We  do  lead  our  animals  to  watering  on 
the  Sabbath  (comp.  Tosifta  Sabb.  iv.  i.).  What  of  that  ?  It 
is  not  a  labor  or  an  act  seductive  to  any  kind  of  it,  if  proper 
provision  is  made  with  the  view  to  the  prohibition  of  carry- 
ing from  private  precincts  to  public  places  (see  Mishnah, 
Erubin  ii.  i).  Whereas  we  believe  that  if  healing  is  per- 
mitted to  go  on  on  the  Sabbath,  the  apprehension  that  real 
labor  may  ensue  from  it  in  the  agitation  and  anxiety  of  the 
mind  of  both  the  curer  and  the  patient,  is  near  enough. 
We  therefore  hold  it  forbidden.  To  you,  of  course,  the 
apprehension  that  one  might  heedlessly  come  to  commit 
the  labor  of  crushing  medicinal  roots  on  the  Sabbath,  may 
appear  as  a  capricious  stickling.  For  even  if  he  should 
trespass  that  way,  he  would  in  your  view  at  most  violate  an 
angelic  or  humanly  Mosaic  command.  To  us,  however, 
who  are  convinced  of  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Sabbath 
law,  as  well  as  of  the  Divine  denunciation  of  kareth 
"  extermination  "  against  its  violators,  it  must  be  of  vital 
concern  to  guard  ourselves  and  others  from  its  breach  by 
all  possible  ramparts  of  prevention." 


176  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

We  will  now  proceed  to  the  accounts  of  the  fourth 
gospel.  This  half-Gnostic  Gentile  Christian  writer,  who, 
by  the  way,  expressed  himself  as  frivolously  about  the 
Mosaic  Law  as  he  alluded  insolently  to  the  Jews,  has  in  ch. 
V.  17,  after  the  mention  of  Jesus'  curing  an  "infirm"  man  on 
a  Sabbath  at  the  pool  of  Bethesda  (probably  situated  south 
of  Jerusalem),  imputed  to  him  as  argument  of  apology: 
"My  Father  worketh  until  now  and  I  work  too."  There  is 
surely  no  intrinsic  evidence  against  the  authenticity  of  this 
argument,  either  in  its  language  or  contents.  Jesus  was, 
we  should  think,  quite  as  able  to  resort  to  this  kind  of 
reasoning  as  he  was  to  the  other  related  by  Matthew.  But 
since  the  genuineness  of  John's  narrative  is,  on  the  whole, 
as  will  be  seen  immediately,  subject  to  serious  doubt,  and 
the  substance  of  the  argument  itself  bears  in  our  view 
a  native  Gentile  stamp,  we  will  not  be  amiss  in  attributing 
the  quoted  sentence  to  this  author  as  his  own  free  composi- 
tion, rather  than  to  Jesus.  Keim  (1.  c.  iii.  p.  215)  has 
already  critically  noted  the  circumstance,  that  John  has  in 
the  narrative  in  point  totally  transposed  a  certain  cure  by 
Jesus  of  a  paralytic  in  Capernaum,  reported  by  the  Synop- 
tics (Matt.  ix.  1-8;  Mark  ii.  1-12;  Luke  v.  16  transfers  the 
scene  to  the  wilderness,  however),  to  Jerusalem,  making, 
moreover,  of  the  sick  a  chronic  sufferer  of  thirty  eight 
years'  standing,  and  fixing  the  cure  on  the  Sabbath.  That 
the  author  of  the  fourth  gospel  used  that  Synoptical 
account  and  spun  out  his  own  story  from  it,  making  of  it  a 
Sabbath  and  Sonship  controversy,  appears  to  us  very  prob- 
able. Aside  from  this  we  have  the  following  momentous 
objection  to  the  claim  of  the  authenticity  of  the  narrative. 
The  argument  itself  imputed  to  Jesus  has  to  us  the  signa- 
ture of  Gentile  reflection.  Not  that  Jesus,  having  else- 
where made  the  declaration  that  "the  Son  of  man  is  lord  of 
the  Sabbath,"  which  was  certainly  the  most  sweeping  he 
could  utter  regarding  the  Sabbath,  was  not  capable,  too,  of 
giving  vent  to  the  idea  of  work  being  free  to  him,  because 
God  his  Father  works  also  on  the  Sabbath.  But  we  have 
from  several  analogies  of  Gentile  Christianity  the  strong- 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  1 77 

est  warrant  for  our  opinion,  that  such  argument  was 
exclusively  employed  by  this  class.  We  hold  it  to  have 
been  the  stable  one  with  Gentile  Christians  in  their  polem- 
ics with  Jews  on  the  obligation  of  the  Sabbath. 

Justin  Martyr,  in  his  Dialogue  with  Trypho,  the  Jew,  ch. 
xxiii.,  holds  out  to  him,  whom  he  wishes  to  turn  to  his  anti- 
Mosaic  Christianity,  the  point  of  consideration,  alleged  to 
have  been  used  by  the  old  man  through  whom  he  himself 
had  been  converted  to  Christianity, — that  "the  elements 
(or  stars)  are  neither  idle  nor  do  they  sabbatize."  He  aimed 
thereby  to  impress  on  Trypho,  that  the  Sabbath  command 
cannot  be  from  God,  because  he  continues  to  put  forth  his 
providential  energy  on  the  Sabbath  as  well.  (In  connec- 
tion with  this  point  he  urges  another,  namely,  that,  since 
the  Sabbath  was  not  dommanded  before  Moses,  and  was 
then  introduced  only  because  of  Israel's  sins,  neither  can  it 
be  obligatory  now,  since  Jesus  Christ,  the  virgin-born  of 
Abraham's  seed,  had  been  sent  on  account  of  sin.)  In  the 
same  Dialogue,  ch.  xxix.,  where  Justin  had  previously 
scornfully  remarked  that  the  Jews  do  not  understand  the 
sense  of  Scripture,  he  reflects  on  the  non-observance  by 
the  (Gentile)  Christians  of  the  Sabbath,  saying:  "Nor 
must  you  (the  Jews)  think  it  something  fearful  that  we 
drink  warm  water  on  the  Sabbath  (that  is,  heat  the  water 
to  drink  or  use  it),  since  God  administers  the  world  on  this 
day  in  just  the  same  way  as  on  all  the  others."  He  adds 
there  yet  in  apology  of  his  Christian  standpoint  the  ground 
of  objection  advanced  in  Matthew  xii.  5;  and  further,  that 
so  many  just  men  who  lived  before  Moses,  had  been 
approved  by  God,  though  they  observed  none  of  the  ritual- 
istic laws  of  Mosaism. 

To  strengthen  our  opinion,  that  the  argument  of  God's 
providential  working  on  the  Sabbath  was  peculiar  to  Gen- 
tile Christianity  for  its  opposition  to  the  observance  of  the 
day  by  Jews,  we  will  yet  adduce  a  pertinent  instance  from 
the  Rabbinical  literature.  It  is  a  relation  of  the  Midrash 
which,  while  it  is  of  a  legendary  composition,  shows  yet  the 
settled  existence  of  that  argument  with  the  Gentile  profes- 
sors of  Christianity.    "A   Minean,"it  is   said    there,  "over- 


1 78  THE   SABBATH    IN    ULSTORY. 

heard  the  four  Palestinian  Rabbis  (Gamaliel,  Klazar,  Josua 
and  Akiba,  supposed  to  have  been  in  Rome  about  96  C.  E. ; 
see  Graetz,  History  of  the  Jews)  preach  in  the  city  of  Rome 
on  the  topic,  that  God  not  only  commands,  but  himself 
observes  what  he  asks  men  to  do;  herein  (as  in  other  things) 
he  is  exalted  above  human  rulers,  who  give  orders,  but  do 
not  obey  them  themselves.  (This  was,  by  the  way,  a  favor- 
ite theme  with  the  older  Rabbis  ;  comp.  Jer.  Rosh.  Hash.  f. 
57).  When  they  left  after  they  had  done  preaching,  a  Minean 
questioned  them  :  '  If  your  affirmation  were  true,  why  is  it, 
then,  that  God  does  not  himself  keep  the  Sabbath  ?'  etc." 
(Rabb.  Ex.  ch.  xxx.)  We  refrain  from  reproducing  the 
sequel  of  the  controversy.  It  turns  on  a  scholastic  problem 
in  which,  we  presume,  the  non-theological  reader  cannot 
be  interested.  That  entire  Midrash  relation  is  indeed  an 
unreal  expository  web,  which  could  have  been  of  value  only 
to  Israelites  in  the  earlier  stage  of  culture.  But  yet  it  con- 
tains this  historical  thread  at  least,  that  Mineans  were  wont 
to  argue  against  the  Sabbath  from  the  point  of  view  of 
God's  providential  activity  on  it.  The  Minean  of  the 
Midrash  was,  as  we  prefer  to  hold  from  the  analogy  of 
Justin's  identical  argument,  a  Gentile  Christian. 

But  even  if  he  had  been  meant  for  a  pagan  Roman, — this 
class  were  also  in  the  Rabbinical  literature  denominated 
Mineans, — our  view  would  not  the  less  gain  a  very  substan- 
tial support  from  that  Midrashic  relation.  In  so  far  at 
least,  as  we  learn  from  it  that  the  objection  to  the  Sabbath 
on  the  ground  of  God's  exercising  his  providential  energy 
on  it,  had  a  Gentile  origin.  And  this  we  essentially  aimed 
at  when  we  proposed,  that  it  issued  from  Gentile  Chris- 
tianity, and  was  habitual  with  this  party,  in  contrast  with 
Jewish  Christianity. 

That  the  before-mentioned  Minean  might  have  been  in- 
tended for  a  pagan  Roman,  is  manifest  from  the  following 
notice  in  another  place  of  the  Midrash.  In  the  continua- 
tion of  the  dialogue  between  Rabbi  Akiba  and  Tinnius 
Rufus  which  we  presented  above  (p.  82),  the  latter  asked 
the  Rabbi  :  "  If  indeed  it  be  so  as  you  pretend,  that  God 
honors  the  Sabbatli,  why  does  he  on  it  make  the  wind  blow, 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  179 

the  rain  fall,  and  the  grass  grow  ? "  The  Rabbi's  reply  does 
not  concern  us  now.  We  only  wished  here  to  refer  to  that 
dialogue  for  the  purpose  of  corroborating  our  supposition, 
that  that  Minean  could  well  have  been  a  heathen  Roman.** 
The  sanne  point  of  argument  having  been  attributed  to  both 
the  Minean  and  the  governor  Tinnius  Rufus.  it  is  surely 
not  far  from  possible,  that  the  two  relations  entered  the 
Midrash  from  the  actual  experience  of  disputes  on  the  Sab- 
bath held  between  Jews  and  Romans,  especially  imperial 
officers  stationed  in  Palestine  with  whom  Rabbis  and  other 
Jewish  people  frequently  met  and  had  encounters  on  points 
of  Jewish  religious  law.  This  does  yet  not  exclude  the 
same  argument  being  often  used  by  Gentile  converts  to 
Christianity  who  fanatically  opposed  Jewish  rites  in  general, 
and  especially  contended  that  they  were  not  liable  to  the 
observance  of  the  Sabbath, — all  in  accordance  with  the 
license  promulgated  by  the  apostle  of  the  Gentiles,  Paul. 
We  have  practically  shown  it  used  by  Justin.  And  we 
maintain,  too,  that  it  proceeded  from  unconsecrated  Gen- 
tile thought,  but  not  from  the  minds  of  the  Jewish-born 
devotees  of  the  new  sect.  (It  is  yet  possible  that  a  few 
fanatical  Hellenistic  Christians  of  the  type  of  Stephen  were 
essentially  in  accord  with  the  Christian  converts  from 
paganism.)  Our  view  therefore  is,  that  the  author  of  the 
fourth  gospel  imputed  to  Jesus  the  above  noted  argument 
from  his  own  mind. 

This  view,  in  passing,  furnishes  at  the  same  time  an 
evidence,  indirectly  at  least, — if  any  additional  one  were 
yet  needed, —  that  that  gospel  was  not  written  by  the  Jewish 
Christian  apostle,  John,  but  by  a  Gentile  who  had  assumed 
this  name.  As  to  the  Sabbath  controversy  in  point  it 
remains  yet  to  be  noted,  that  John  has  given  it  a  twofold 
bearing.  Not  only  is  Jesus  rebuked  for  healing  on  the 
Sabbath,  but  also  the  cured  man  is  rigidly  questioned  about 
his  license  in  taking  up  his  bed  and  walking  away  with  it, 
it  being  the  Sabbath  (v.  10)."  The  implication  is,  that  the 
Jews  (it  is  mainly  the  Jews  in  general  who  are  brought  for- 
ward in  the  fourth  gospel  as  Jesus'  antagonists,  not  the 
Pharisees,    as    in  the  Synoptics  ;   the  change    was  without 


l80  Tt4E    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

doubt  made  from  the  anti-Jewish  sentiment  of  its  author) 
were  indignant  at  his  carrying  away  his  couch  on  which  he 
lay  prostrate  in  one  of  the  porches  of  the  pool.  We  have 
to  interpret  the  accusation,  if  it  is  to  have  any  sense  at  all, 
that  the  Jews  were  exasperated  at  his  breaking  the  Sabbath 
law  of  carrying  things  from  a  private  precinct  to  a  public 
place,  or,  as  it  might  have  been,  the  reverse,  which  was 
indeed  a  grave  offence  with  them,  and  one  prominently 
included  in  the  thirty-nine  chief  labors  prohibited  on  the 
Sabbath.  The  removing  of  the  bed  itself,  however,  that  is, 
its  handling,  was  surely  not  thought  unlawful  by  any  one 
of  the  orthodox  Jevv^s.  Whether  Jesus  was  also  charged 
with  that  offence,  because  he  had  occasioned  it  by  his 
address  to  the  impotent  man  (v.  8),  is  not  directly  clear 
from  V.  i6. 

John's  other  altercation  between  the  Jews  and  Jesus  about 
his  Sabbatic  healing  reported  in  ch.  vii.,  is  so  hopelessly 
entangled  in  the  context  in  which  it  is  placed,  that  it  can 
yield  no  satisfactory  decision,  whether  he  intended  it  for  an 
independent  controversy  or  only  as  supplemental  to  the 
previous  one  hereto  discussed.  We  cannot  be  expected 
to  try  to  throw  light  on  the  confused  matter  of  the  vv.  14- 
25,  in  which  that  altercation  is  produced.  This  is  a  task  for 
Christian  expounders.  On  the  whole  we  have  the  impres- 
sion that  it  logically  and  locally  belongs  to  the  controversy 
of  ch.  V.  Why  it  was  left  out  there  and  came  to  be  placed 
here,  is  inexplicable  to  us. 

Now  the  new  argument  with  which  Jesus  is  introduced 
here  in  v.  23  in  repelling  the  charge  of  Sabbath  breaking  by 
"making  a  man  whole"  was,  that  the  Jews  themselves 
allow  circumcision  to  take  place  on  the  Sabbath.  The 
"ruler"  who  had  called  him  to  account  for  it,  then  "said 
nothing  unto  him"  (v.  26).  John  insinuates  by  this  state- 
ment that  they  were  too  much  astounded  at  the  over- 
whelming intelligence  of  "  the  Christ"  to  come  forward 
with  an  answer. 

What  is  the  pith  of  the  argument  imputed  here  to 
Jesus  .-*  This  is  indeed  very  difficult  to  decide.  From  its 
external  tone  and   aspect   w.;  should  judge   that  it  is  sub- 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORV.  l8l 

stantially  similar  to  Jesus'  objection  of  the  Temple  sacrifice 
vacating-  the  Sabbath  (  see  Matt.  xii.  5  ).  Both  sacrifice  and 
circumcision  on  the  legal  eighth  day,  had  indeed  vacated  the 
Sabbath  obligation  according  to  Jewish  custom.  A  solid 
warrant  for  the  latter  is  variously  attempted  to  be  obtained 
in  B.  Sabb.  f.  132.  The  argument  attributed  to  Jesus  may 
have  been  meant  to  be  :  "  If  out  of  regard  to  the  Mosaic 
Law  commanding  the  rite  of  circumcision  for  the  eighth 
day,  the  Sabbath  has  to  recede  before  it  in  the  instance  that 
both  collide,  because  ycu  hold  that  without  its  performance 
on  the  proper  day  the  ]e\v  is  not  perfect  before  God,  how 
can  you  be  angry  at  me  for  making  a  sick  man  entirely 
whole  or /^^r/i"^^  (though  only  physically). -•  "  Possibly — as 
it  has  been  suggested  already  by  others,  see  Bloomfield's 
commentary,  in  loco — the  following  antithesis  was  here 
aimed  at:  "If  the  Sabbath  has  to  yield  to  a  rite  performed 
only  on  a  single  part  of  the  body,  how  can  it  be  wrong  to 
attend  to  a  whole  (suffering)  human  being  and  completely 
restore  him.''"  In  the  same  strain  a  Rabbi  of  old  is 
reported  to  have  argued  to  defend  and  support  the  rule 
that  ''saving  life  vacates  the  Sabbath."  "If  circumcision," 
the  Rabbi  reasons,  "which  is  done  on  only  one  member  of 
the  body,  puts  the  Sabbath  aside,  how  much  the  more  must 
the  entire  human  body  (when  endangered)  have  the  force 
of  temporarily  vacating  it  .-'"  (Mechilta  p.  iio).  We 
venture  yet  another  possible  interpretation  of  the  argu- 
ment as  set  forth  by  the  author  of  the  fourth  gospel.  It 
has  to  be  borne  in  mind  that  Jesus  passes  with  this  evan- 
gelist as  the  pre-existent  Logos  that  became  flesh  in  him. 
The  Mosaic  Law  and  the  dogma  on  Jesus  as  worked  out  by 
this  writer,  were  utter  opposites  (see  i.  17;  and  comp.  v.  8, 
9;  iii.  36).  The  antithesis  he  imputed  to  Jesus  in  vii.  23, 
may  accordingly  have  been  intended  to  have  this  force  : 
"If  a  Jew  may  be  circumcised  on  the  Sabbath,  that  the  law 
of  (your)  Moses  may  not  be  broken,  are  you  wroth  with 
me  because  I,  viz.,  the  only  begotten  God  (see  i.  18),  nay, 
identical  with  God  as  the  personified  Logos  (see  i.  i),  made 
(by  my  divine,  miraculous  power)  a  human  being  entirely 
well  again?     If  the  authority  of  Moses  who  has  commanded 


l82  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

you  all  those  laws,  is  to  be  respected  to  such  a  degree  that 
even  the  Sabbath  has  temporarily  to  yield  to  another  para- 
mount command  of  his,  how  much  the  more  authority  must 
I  have  for  my  own  acts  who,  in  my  capacity  as  the  Word 
incarnate,  am  surely  so  much  superior  to  him!  " 

Putting  this  construction  on  the  argument,  we  find  it  to 
have  about  the  same  motive  as  the  antithesis  which  Jesus 
is  by  Matthew  reported  to  have  employed  in  the  Sabbath 
controversy  recorded  there.  There  the  superiority  of  Jesus 
above  the  Temple  is  affirmed;  here  that  above  Moses. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 


RETROSPECT   AS    TO  JESUS'  POSITION  ON  THE  SABBATH. 

The  Sabbath  disputes  brought  forward  and  discussed  in 
the  two  foregoing  chapters,  whatever  may  have  to  be 
objected  to  the  genuineness  of  the  one  or  the  other  of  them, 
and  whether  or  not  only  those  of  Matthew  have  a  claim  to 
historical  recognition,  show  at  least  this  solid  kernel  of 
authenticity  that  Jesus,  as  Keim  remarks  in  vol.  iii.  p.  326 
of  his  work,  "set  himself  in  conflict  with  the  law  of  the 
Sabbath,  as  he  most  decidedly  did  with  the  Mosaic  divorce 
ordinance."  We  will,  besides,  reproduce  this  author's 
reflection  on  the  page  following  there:  "No  instance  of 
neglect  of  the  Law  on  the  part  of  Jesus  can,  it  is  true,  be 
formally  established.  But  his  self-dispensations  from  the 
severe  rule  of  the  Sabbath,  etc.,  point  in  that  direction." 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  1 83 

These  concessions  we  have  to  put  up  with,  considering 
that  they  come  from  an  author  who,  on  the  one  hand, 
strenuously  exerts  himself  to  defend  the  Law-abiding  posi- 
tion of  Jesus,  and  on  the  other,  can,  as  a  Christian  writer, 
trained  in  the  Pauline  faith-religion  and  consequently 
imbued  with  a  Gentile  anti-Mosaic  bias,  if  not  an  anti-Jew- 
ish disdain,  not  well  be  expected  to  enter  with  any  sympa- 
thetic estimation  of  Jewish  religious  sentiment  into  the 
survey  of  Jesus'  speeches  and  activity,  antagonistic  to 
orthodox  Judaism. 

We  have  yet  to  state  that  he  has  ultimately  not  left  those 
concessions  unaltered.  In  his  attempt  at  championing 
Jesus  as  an  upholder  of  the  Law,  he  afterwards  modifies 
them  again.  The  fact  is,  his  view  on  Jesus'  regard  for  the 
Law  is  so  unsettled  and  wavering  (we  have  touched  on 
this  already  above),  that  we  are  at  our  wits'  end  in  attempt- 
ing to  ascertain  which  one  of  his  manifold  sentiments  we 
shall  choose  as  the  standard  for  accurately  judging  of  it. 
We  can  indulge  his  inconsistency  only  in  view  of  that  of 
the  gospel  accounts  themselves.  The  modification  of  his 
judgment  occurring  on  page  327,  he  gives  forth  on  pp.  362- 
63,  where  he  does  not  objectively  admit  Jesus'  disregard  of 
the  Law,  but  does  so  only  subjectively,  that  is,  as  to  the 
perception  and  purpose  of  the  Phariseic  opponents.  "But 
it  was  easy  for  them,"  he  says  there,  "to  establish,  in  a 
number  of  points,  his  disregard  of  the  Law,  etc"  His  other 
observation  on  the  conflict  of  Jesus  with  the  law  of  the 
Sabbath  on  p.  326,  he  subsequently  qualifies  in  so  much, 
that  Jesus  "decided,  on  his  own  authority,  that  the  law  of 
the  Sabbath  must  be  limited  by  the  moral  law,  which 
allowed  the  doing  what  was  necessary  to  the  maintenance 
of  life,  and  commanded  the  saving  of  one's  neighbor." 

This  sweeping  qualification  has,  we  own,  a  very  luring 
sound;  but  only  to  the  Gentile  Christian  who  swears  on  the 
words  of  the  teacher  Paul,  that  with  and  through  Jesus  the 
Mosaic  ritual  was  abolished,  and  who  regards  the  ethical 
Jesus-religion  as  the  legal  system  that  was,  by  a  Divine 
arrangement,  to  supplant  Mosaism.  Different  it  was,  how- 
ever, with  the  representatives  of  orthodox  Judaism  in  Jesus' 


184  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

time.  They  would  not  only  not  own  any  contrast  between 
the  ritual  and  moral  law,  but  would  denounce  any  attempt 
at  putting  up  such  a  contrast  as  a  rank  heresy.  For  to 
them  there  was,  nay,  there  could  be,  no  moral  law  without, 
not  to  say,  above  the  Mosaic  code.  It  was  fully  contained 
therein,  partly  expressly  and  partly  by  implication.  Both 
the  ritualistic  ordinances  and  the  moral  rules  of  life  were  to 
them  equally  enunciated  by  God  through  Moses.  They 
were  to  them  coming  from  one  source,  were  of  one  mould, 
and  most  congruous  with  one  another.  In  their  judgment 
and  belief,  therefore,  the  plea  that  there  is  an  extraneous 
moral  law  which  is  to  serve  as  the  regulator  of  the  Sabbath 
observance,  as  Keim  formulates  it,  must  have  been  as  sub- 
versive of  true  Judaism,  as  any  other  radically  irreligious 
assault  upon  it. 

But  Keim's  qualification  is  defective  and  incorrect  from 
still  another  view.  He  evidently  meant  to  suggest  that 
the  plucking  by  the  hungry  apostles  of  a  few  ears  of  corn 
on  the  Sabbath,  was  a  thing  "necessary  to  the  maintenance 
of  life."  which  cause  decided  Jesus  to  interpose  with  the 
dispensation  urged  by  the  moral  law.  But  where  in  the 
world  did  that  author  gather  the  information  that  the 
maintenance  of  life  depended  on  those  few  ears  of  corn.'' 
How  does  he  know  that  the  apostles' craving  was  mortal,  or 
would  at  least  have  proved  injurious,  had  they  not  gratified 
it  on  the  spot.''  How  does  he  know  that  they  could  not 
have  succeeded  to  get  victuals  for  satisfying  their  hunger 
in  many  another  way,  if  they  were  only  willing  to  make 
some  exertion,  have  a  little  patience,  and  impose  on  them- 
selves a  momentary  self-abnegation  .-'  The  text  does, 
indeed,  not  say  that  they  were  famished  or  pinched  with 
hunger,  so  that  waiting  any  longer  could  have  been  fraught 
with  a  dangerous  collapse.  They  were  only  "an  hungred." 
And  since  we  justl}'  infer  from  the  observation  by  the 
Pharisees  of  the  apostles'  act,  that  the  latter  were  then  only 
taking  a  walk  along  the  near  outskirts  of  the  town  of 
Capernaum,  wc  may  further  fairly  conclude  that,  if  they 
had  felt  the  commonly  prevailing  reverence  for  the  Sab- 
bath, they  could   without  any  real   suffering  and   fear  of  ill 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  185 

result  from  their  hungry  sensations,  have  wended  their  way 
back  and  got  all  they  wanted  to  eat  in  a  lawful  manner, 
among  the  coreligionists  in  town.  As  to  Keim's  other 
point  in  that  qualifying  sentence,  that  "  the  moral  law  com- 
manded the  saving  of  one's  neighbor,"  we  indeed  agree,  as 
we  are  positive  that  the  Pharisees  of  old  did  agree  (see 
above),  that  this  principle  is  alike  reasonable  and  coercive. 
Yet  that  author's  bringing  it  to  bear  on  the  issue  of  Jesus' 
miraculous  healing  of  the  man  with  a  withered  hand  on  the 
Sabbath,  is  impertinent,  because  he  presents  that  moral 
law  as  an  extraneous  abstract  power,  demanding  that  the 
Sabbath  give  way  to  such  kind  of  saving  one's  neighbor. 
He  ought  to  have  known  from  the  relative  passages  of  the 
Rabbinical  literature  accessible  to  non-Jewish  Inquirers  as. 
well,  that  orthodox  Judaism  itself  found  it  totally  con- 
gruous with  the  Mosaic  dispensation,  that  "saving  life 
should  vacate  the  Sabbath,"  without  even  faintly  looking 
for  any  external  standard  that  would  in  such  cases  urge  to 
interfere  on  behalf  of  suffering  humanity,  viz.,  the  moral 
law  !  Lastly,  we  have  to  object  to  Keim's  qualifying  sen- 
tence that,  whatever  moral  considerations  may  have  pre- 
vailed with  Jesus  in  defending  those  anti-Sabbatic  acts 
recorded  in  Matt,  xii.,  yet  as  the  most  weighty  and  para- 
mount argument  stands  forth  indisputably  his  assertion  of 
a  personal,  divine-like  authority  over  the  Sabbath,  in  the 
words  :  "For  the  Son  of  man  is  lord  of  the  Sabbath. "^ 
Here  it  is  no  more  an  abstract  ethical  criterion  urging  on 
to  interference  with  the  Sabbath,  but  a  prete;,nded  divinity 
of  some  sort,  personified  in  himself.  What  this  affirmation 
must  have  implied  to  the  orthodox  opponents  of  Jesus,  we 
have  already  suggested  before.  Christian  writers  who  pro- 
pose to  themselves  the  task  of  exalting,  in  behalf  of  Jesus, 
the  moral  law  that  was  to  repel,  in  accordance  with  his 
precepts,  the  Sabbath  observance,  ought  at  the  same  time 
not  to  overlook  or  lightly  pass  over  the  fact  of  that  affirma- 
tion, which  by  far  outweighs  in  significance  the  emphasis  of 
humane  points  of  view  attributed  to  Jesus  in  the  record  of 
that  Sabbath  controversy.  They  ought  to  consider,  fur- 
ther, that  if  Jesus  had  held    those  moral  considerations  a 


1 86  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

sufficiently  valid  apology  for  the  act  construed  as  a 
breach  of  the  Sabbath  by  his  opponents,  he  would  not  have 
had  to  add  the  argument  of  his  own  supernatural  authority 
over  it. 

If  Christian  writers  made  proper  account  of  this,  they 
would  not  inveigh  against  the  orthodox  antagonists  of- 
Jesus  with  such  endless  volleys  of  revilement  as  we  find 
that  most  of  them  do,  from  the  relentless  Canon  Farrar 
(see  his  '  The  Life  of  Christ')  to  the  more  moderate  Keim, 
who  vents  the  following  (1.  c.)  :  "  It  is  well  known  how 
scrupulously,  how  sternly,  the  Jews,  especially  the  Phari- 
sees (the  latter  is  not  true,  for  the  common  Jewish  people — 
the  Am-ha-arets — were  provably,  as  far  as  they  knew  how 
to  be  so,  every  whit  as  conscientious  in  the  observance  of 
the  Sabbath  as  the  learned,  pious  extremists;  and  as  to  the 
Sadducees  and  Essenes,  their  Sabbath  strictness  was  surely 
without  any  flaw,  though  it  had,  according  to  their  respect- 
ive sectarian  tenets,  a  somewhat  different  aspect  from  the 
Phariseic  ;  see  our  Note  42),  upheld  the  honor  of  the  day 
which  was  said  to  have  been  solemnized  by  Adam, 
although  they  expressly  elevated  it  into  the  weekly  day  of 
enjoyment  (this  is  the  height  of  insolent  perversion  of 
truth,  and  betrays  the  author's  ignorance  of  the  history  of 
the  Sabbath,  which  exhibits  in  numberless  instances  the 
keenest  conception  by  the  pious  Jews  of  the  day  as  one  of 
self-sanctification,  while  all  the  enjoyment  by  which  they 
distinguished  it — and  they  did  distinguish  it  so  solely 
because  "delight"  was,  according  to  Isa.  Iviii.  13,  one  of  its 
signatures — was  limited  to  innocent  comforts  which  were 
sufficiently  tempered,  if  b}^  nothing  else,  surely  by  the 
many  minute  restrictions  as  to  acts  and  movements  with 
which  the  Sabbath  law  was  traditionally  and  continuously 
hedged  in)  ;  how,  under  the  ridicule  of  the  Gentiles  they 
lost  battles  and  repeatedly  lost  Jerusalem  when  besieged, 
through  their  Sabbath  rest,  etc."  (The  ridicule,  it  need 
not  be  said,  Keim  has  surely  not  witnessed  himself,  nor  is 
it  likely  that  the  hostile  forces  and  their  leaders  had  in  the 
hot  pursuit  of  w^irfare  leisure  enough  to  indulge  in  it.      He 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  18/ 

has  no  historical  witnesses  for  it,  either,  for  what  he 
evidently  alludes  to,  was  uttered  by  some  pagan  writers 
long  after  the  respective  events,  but  not  by  the  pagan  com- 
batants themselves;  see  above  p.  13). 

It  is,  indeed,  easy  for  the  Christian  biographers  of  Jesus 
to  follow  the  contemptuous  tone  of  the  gospels  towards  his 
orthodox  opponents  of  old,  and  level  against  them  all  the 
taunt  their  vocabulary  supplies,  for  their  minute  ritualistic 
peculiarities  on  the  one  hand,  and,  on  the  other,  for  having 
had  the  susceptibility  of  being  scandalized  by  the  various 
innovations  of  him,  who  was  one  of  their  own  nation,  and 
concerning  whom  their  judgment,  but  not  that  of  Gentiles, 
whether  of  antiquity  or  of  modern  days,  was  the  only  com- 
petent criterion.  For,  as  Hartmann,  'The  Self-Decompo- 
sition of  Christianity,'  says,  "Jesus  was  a  Jew  from  head  to 
toe;  his  culture  was  a  national  Jewish  one;"  and  again, 
"Jesus  is  Jew  and  nothing  but  Jew."  Jesus  truly  belonged 
to  the  jurisdiction  of  the  authorities  of  his  own,  the  Jewish, 
people.  His  continuous  contact  and,  as  we  also  know,  fre- 
quent contentions,  were  with  Jewish  people.  And  it  is  the 
Jezvs  only  who  have  the  indefeasible  right  of  submitting  his 
acts  and  speeches  to  the  critical  judgment,  zvhich  the  same- 
ness of  racial  ties  and  the  common  native  religion,  as  well 
as  the  common  patrimony  of  one  record  of  ancestral  history, 
alone  authorise. 

Again,  it  is  easy  for  those  biographers  to  pour  out  every 
imaginable  epithet  of  abuse  and  scorn  upon  the  Scribes  and 
Pharisees  whose  ceremonial  austerity,  while  it  was  exact- 
ing towards  others,  was  at  the  same  time  of  a'  most  self- 
denying  character,  because  they  stand  at  the  safe  distance 
of  nearly  nineteen  hundred  years  from  them.  They  have 
surely  not  to  fear  their  rising  from  the  grave  to  avenge  the 
rancorous  and  derisive  language  which  they  employ  against 
them.  No  Christian  writer  of  our  times  who,  like  Canon 
Farrar,  for  instance,  standing  on  the  proud  pedestal  of 
monumental  Gentile  presumption,  looks  contemptuously 
down  and  vents  his  biting  sarcasm  on  them,  runs  any  risk 
on  that  head.  And  as  to  the  offence  given  by  such  scornful 
derogation  and  heartless  criticism  of  the  opponents  of  Jesus 


1 88  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

to  those  who  are  of  all  others  sensitively  affected  by  it,  the 
Jews  of  every  age,  there  is  no  scruple  about  that,  either. 
Do  not  the  Jews  for  their  small  numbers  stand  in  vanishing 
proportion  to  the  multitude  of  Gentile  Christians.-'  These 
have  on  their  side  at  once  the  impunity  and  the  immunities 
which  are,  as  this  world  goes,  peculiar  to  the  majority  and 
to  might.  The  Christian  Gentiles,  at  least  many  of 
them,  while  they  claim  to  be  the  spiritual  heirs  of  old 
Israel, — with  an  egregious  improvement  on  the  heritage  to 
boot, — yet  think  themselves  warranted  in  haughtily  dis- 
sociating themselves  from  the  Jews  in  the  inmost  range  of 
their  feeling,  as  well  as  in  their  turn  of  mind.  They  eye 
them  askance  with  a  sort  of  scornful  pity,  and  in  the  vain 
sense  of  a  fancied  superiority,  which  the  mingled  Pauline 
and  Johannine  spirit  has,  in  written  and  in  spoken  words, 
been  producing  and  nurturing  all  through  these  past 
eighteen  centuries.  There  is  no  denying  this  to  be  true. 
The  writer  giving  unreserved  utterance  to  this  deplorable 
circumstance, — he  does  it  though  with  resentment  and 
malice  towards  none, — regards  himself  entitled  to  the  claim 
of  an  accurate  notice  of  it.  Close  observations  running 
through  a  period  of  nearly  four  decades  of  his  own  life,  and, 
besides,  a  fair  proportion  of  literary  information,  confirm 
him  in  the  assumption  of  its  positive  existence. 

Now  if  non-Jewish  biographers  of  Jesus  cannot  help 
admitting  his  conflict  with  the  law  of  the  Sabbath  and  its 
apparent  neglect  by  him  (Farrar  gives  it  thus  in  his  most 
amiable  style  :  "Jesus  laid  his  axe  at  the  root  of  their 
proud  and  ignorant  Sabbatarianism;"  as  above,  ii.  ii8), 
what  has  the  Jewish  investigator  to  say.-*  He  will,  as  the 
writer  does,  concede  that  Jesus  observed  the  Sabbath 
(comp.  also  Matt.  xxiv.  20),  that  he  did  not  directly  disown 
its  inviolability  by  common  labor,  not  to  say,  that  he  did 
not  decree  its  abolition,  or  much  the  less  propose  that 
another  day  be  substituted  in  its  place. 

Yet  we  learn  from  the  gospels,  on  the  other  hand,  that  he 
opposed  the  traditional  mode  of  its  observance,  as  it  was 
conceived  and  practiced  by  the  generality  of  the  Jewish 
people  of  his    day.     We    have,  further,  above  essayed    to 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  189 

show  convincingly  that  he  cannot  have  believed  in  the 
Divine  authority  of  the  Law,  even  of  the  Decalogue,  in 
which  the  institution  of  the  Sabbath  was  so  eminently 
enjoined.  As  another  additional,  though  only  indirect, 
evidence  that  he  disbelieved  the  Divine  authority  of  the 
Sabbath,  we  have  produced  above,  p.  147,  his  eliminating 
its  observance  from  the  number  of  obligations  indispens- 
able for  entrance  into  the  world  to  come. 

Should  there  even  be  a  possibility  of  refuting  our  rela- 
tive proofs,  yet  no  one  will  be  able  or  have  the  hardihood 
to  deny  the  authenticity  of  the  sentence,  appearing  in  all 
the  three  Synoptics,  that  "the  Son  of  man  (himself)  is  lord 
of  the  Sabbath."  This  alone  would  show  his  denial  of  the 
Divine  institution  of  the  Sabbath.  That  sentence  unques- 
tionably bears  the  sense,  that  Jesus  claimed,  in  his  pre- 
tended divine-like  Messianic  capacity,  to  have  the  power 
of  annulling  the  Sabbath  at  will,  or  at  any  rate  to  order  it 
to  yield  to  his  own  option. 

What  of  it,  then,  that  he  has  not  directly  declared  the 
Sabbath  abolished  .''  Did  it  not  practically,  as  far  as  the 
awe  of  the  Sabbath  for  himself  and  his  followers  was  con- 
cerned, come  to  the  same  thing,  whether  he  spoke  the  final 
word  of  its  abolition,  or  withheld  it,  either  for  prudential 
reasons,  or  because  he  held  all  ceremonial  religion  as 
weighing  too  lightly  against  the  main,  Messianic  question 
that  exclusively  agitated  and  absorbed  his  thought  and 
should  do  so  with  all  his  believers,  for  him  to  set  himself  to 
the  task  of  doctrinally  expatiating  on  the  merits  of  the 
Sabbath,  or  yet,  perhaps,  from  some  scruple  restraining  him 
from  putting  forth  that  decisive  word, — as  long  as  he  openly 
and  directly  pronounced  himself  "lord  of  the  Sabbath  .-'" 

Has  he  by  this  affirmation  not  substantially  laid  the  axe 
on  the  Sabbath  of  the  Decalogue  ?  Has  he  by  it  not  seri- 
ously shaken  the  sense  of  its  obligation  with  his  disciples 
and  his  other  votaries,  who  were  in  the  main  guided  by 
his  words  .''  If  the  Messiah  called  in  question  the  absolute 
inviolability  of  the  Sabbath,  was  it  to  be  expected  that 
they  should  persevere  in  the  traditional  awful  reverence 
towards  it  .'' 

(5) 


IpO  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

It  is  a  known  or,  at  least,  very  noticeable  fact,  that  the 
devotees  of  Jesus  had  implicit,  indestructible  reliance  in 
their  Master's  Messiahship,  and  also  in  the  sure  fulfillment 
of  the  prediction  by  him  of  his  second  coming.  He  himself 
having,  as  we  are  seriously  inclined  to  maintain,  laid  the 
chief  stress  of  his  Messianic  mission  on  his  second  Advent, 
his  votaries  have  naturally  done  likewise.  And  there  is 
abundant  proof  in  the  N.  T.  literature  that  they  were  look- 
ing forward  to  that  Advent  with  intense,  never  faltering 
confidence.  Now  since  there  is  no  reasonable  doubt  that 
those  of  his  followers  who  overheard  him  speak  that 
momentous  sentence  of  his  being  the  "  lord  of  the  Sab- 
bath," took  him  actually  by  his  word  and  interpreted  it  in 
the  plain  sense  which  it  was  to  convey,  viz.,  that  they 
could,  by  his  arbitration,  be  dispensed  from  its  observance: 
may  we  not  justly  suppose,  too,  that  this  word  continued 
to  resound  in  their  consciousness  ever  after  his  death,  so 
long  as  the  paroxysm  of  their  feverish  hope  of  his  second 
Advent  lasted,  which  was,  indeed,  during  the  whole  life- 
time of  each  one  of  them,  deciding  them  in  their  attitude 
towards  the  Sabbath  in  the  same  way  that  his  living  word 
did  ?  And,  further,  must  they  not  all  through  their  own 
lives  have  expected,  for  the  glorious  period  of  his  real 
second  presence,  a  dispensation  from  the  accepted  Jewish 
Sabbath  observance  all  the  more  authoritative,  as  then  he 
would  arrive  "in  glory,  with  angels,  and  as  Judge  of  all" 
(see  Matt.  xvi.  27,  xxv.  31  sq.)  ? 


CHAPTER  XIV. 


THE  SABBATH  WITH  JESUS'  DISCIPLES  IN  HIS  LIFETIME. 

Our  above  expressed  view  of  Jesus'  indifference  to  all 
ceremonial  religion  over  against  the  concerns  of  his 
Messiahdom,  will  find  a  manifest  support  in  the  recorded 
conduct  of  his  disciples  as  to  Jewish  religious  observances. 
That  they  were  nurtured  in  his  opinion  of  the  comparative 
insignificance  of  ceremonial  religion  at  the  then  fancied 
juncture  of  the  partially  inaugurated  and  soon  fully  to  be 
accomplished  kingdom  of  Heaven,  with  himself  as  the  cen- 
tral figure,  we  have  no  doubt.  For  how  else  could  their 
various  slights  of  Jewish  observances,  some  of  them  Mosaic, 
be  accounted  for.''  Wherefrom  should  it  have  come  to 
them  that  they  deliberately  made  light  of,  or  wholly  put 
aside,  the  one  or  the  other  ritualistic  observance,  if  not 
from  the  Master  himself,  and  that  in  consequence  of  his 
all-absorbing  Messianic  object.-*  They  had,  for  example, 
broken  the  Sabbath  by  plucking  ears,  ere  yet  he  had 
brought  forward  the  intricate  points  of  argument  in  defence 
of  their  action.  From  what  motive  or  on  what  pretext  can 
they,  belonging  to  observant  families  as  they  doubtless 
were,  be  supposed  to  have  treated  the  Sabbath  so  laxly,  if 
not  from  that  Messianic,  instilled  on  their  minds  in  the 
daily  commerce  with  the  Master.^  It  is  too  evident  that 
the  whole  immediate  environment  of  Jesus  was  pervaded 
by  his  Messianic  spirit  and  design,  as  well  as  by  the  opin- 
ion that  no  serious  concern  must  be  had  for  anything  but 
for  the  Messianic  kingdom  and  the  narrow  scope  of  the 
natural  religion  of  Messiahism.  In  this  neither  the  Sab- 
bath, nor  the  festivals,  nor  the  fasts,  nor  surely  the  sacri- 
ficial ritual,  nor  any  outward  ceremonial  rite  of  Judaism 
were  included  as  obligatory,  not  to  say,  any  observance  of 
the  so-called  oral  Law,  whether  anciently  traditional,  or 
later  and  periodically  instituted  by  councils  of  schoolmen. 
The  Mosaic  ritual  was  at  the  same  time  not  explicitly  and 


192  THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

openly  excluded  from  the  line  of  religious  practice.  It  was 
only  treated  with  the  laxity  which  a  sense  of  non-obliga- 
tion engenders.  As  with  Jesus,  to  use  Keim's  words  who 
infers  from  the  necessity  of  his  making  the  protest  that  he 
did  not  come  to  abrogate  but  to  fulfil  (Matt.  v.  17),  *' the 
Law  had  in  his  daily  practical  life  retreated  to  the  back- 
ground" (1.  c.  iii.  324),  so  it  had  with  the  apostles.  Or, 
let  us  say  with  reference  to  another  modern  writer, 
Hausrath,  who  agrees  more  directly  with  us  as  to  laying 
the  main  stress  on  Jesus'  Messianic  design  having 
engrossed  his  whole  mind:  As  Jesus,  "from  the  first,  in 
accordance  with  his  preaching  of  the  kingdom  of  God,  put 
aside  those  Jewish  ordinances  (the  Sabbath  observance, 
fasting,  and  conversing  with  publicans  and  sinners  ^^)  as 
things  indifferent"  (1.  c.  ii.  p.  180),  so  did  the  apostles. 
These  men,  unlettered  though  most  of  them  were,  had  yet 
a  clear  enough  comprehension  to  be  susceptible  to  the 
insinuation  of  being  emancipated,  by  ardent  and  sincere 
adherence  to  the  concerns  of  Messiahism,  from  the  bulk 
and  burden  of  religious  practices.  Surely  experience  shows 
at  all  times  that  it  requires  very  little  sagacity  or  learning 
to  catch  the  sense  of  those  preachings,  dispensing  people 
from  ceremonial  observances  attended  with  exertion  or 
self-denial.  When  Keim,  therefore,  proposes  that  the  apos- 
tles "did  not  see  this,"  namely,  that  "Jesus  had  in  his  inner- 
most genius  overstepped  the  limits  of  Judaism,"  and  that  "it 
was  left  to  Paul  and  John  to  fully  develop  the  spirit  of  the 
teaching  of  Jesus"  (1.  c.  iii.  327-28),  he  is  right  as  to  the 
latter  assertion,  and  that  so  far,  that  none  of  the  apostles 
before  Paul  had  decidedly  renounced  allegiance  to  the  body 
of  Mosaism  or  dared  to  declare  it  abrogated.  But  he  is 
surely  in  error  as  to  the  apostles'  inability  of  perceiving 
that  Jesus  had  overstepped  the  limits  of  Judaism.  A  child 
of  sufficiently  matured  mind  noticing  the  contrast  between 
the  religious  precepts  and  practice  that  prevailed  in  the 
average  Jewish  family,  and  the  attitude  regarding  them 
assumed  by  Jesus,  could  have  promptly  realized  that  cir- 
cumstance. Keim  corrects  himself,  though,  in  the  same 
volume   (p.  343),  when  he  says  :     "How  earlj'  the  disciples 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISIORV.  193 

of  Jesus  learned  from  intercourse  with  him  free  principles 
and  free  practices,  is  shown  by  the  complaints  ....  (Matt. 
ix.  14;  xii.  2;  XV.  I,  2,  Luke  v.  33).  In  fact,  the  general 
appearance,  demeanor,  style  of  life  and  habits,  were  such  as 
had  never  been  heard  of  in  Israel  for  a  teacher  or  a  school." 

All  Jesus'  concern  was,  indeed,  his  own  Messianic  king- 
dom of  Heaven,  from  his  initial  utterance  (Matt.  v.  17  sq.), 
through  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  (ib.  vi.  33)  and  his  entire 
subsequent  course,  till  his  final  ostentatious  entry  into 
Jerusalem.  Were  the  apostles  not  naturally  infiltered  with 
the  same  uppermost  notion  and  engrossed  with  the  same 
concern,  subordinating  to  it  not  only  all  worldly  care  (comp. 
Matt.  vi.  25-34),  but  also  all  observance  of  practical  Judaism? 
It  is,  indeed,  only  their  minds'  absorption  by  the  confident 
expectation  of  Jesus  bringing  about  the  much  longed-for 
kingdom  of  Heaven  with  all  its  privileges  and  advantages, 
that  can  account  for  their  now  putting  a  lax  sense  on  this 
ceremonial  rite,  now  on  that,  and  for  their  now  entirely 
setting  at  naught  another.  To  what  degree  they  were 
indoctrinated  with  Jesus'  denial  of  the  Divine  authority  of 
the  Mosaic  Law,  as  well  as,  perhaps,  with  his  other  pro- 
phetical and  Messianic  dispensatory  notions  which  we  pro- 
posed above,  we  would  not  presume  to  decide.  There  is 
in  any  case  sufficient  testimony  of  their  religious  ceremo- 
nial libertinism. 

That  Jesus'  systematic  opposition  to  the  existing  Temple 
service  with  the  vast  range  of  other  ceremonial  obligations 
directly  or  indirectly  connected  with  and  concentring  in 
the  Temple,  passed  to  his  immediate  disciples,  there  can  be 
no  doubt.  Not  only  does  this  antagonism  run  through  the 
whole  of  Jewish  Christianity,  but  there  is  actually  not  the 
slightest  trace  of  the  apostles  having  ever  attended  to  any 
rite  pertaining  to  the  Temple  or  to  sacrifice,  save  the 
Paschal  ceremonial  on  the  eve  before  Jesus'  death,  which 
is,  however,  above  p.  143,  accounted  for  by  his  Messianic 
purpose,  but  not  by  the  ordinary  sense  of  religiously  legal 
obligation.     That  they  made  no  scruple  to  break  the  Sab- 


194  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

bath  in  the  way  stated  in  the  gospels,  is  certainly  a  weighty 
enough  evidence  of  their  religious  libertinism.  We  may 
justly  infer  that  they  made  light  of  the  festivals  in  the  same 
manner. 

That  they  neglected  the  fasts  is  also  authentically 
attested  ;  Matt.  ix.  14.  Their  defense  by  Jesus  bears  all  the 
features  of  genuineness.  How  they  came  to  put  them  aside 
is  as  easily  explained  as  that  they  slighted  the  Sabbath. 
We  propose  that  '  the  slight  rested  in  both  cases  on 
grounds  of  his  Messianic  claim.  Although  it  was 
only  Jesus  who,  in  both  instances,  argued  with  Messianic 
references,  and,  besides,  even  he  urged,  in  that  of  the 
Sabbath  neglect,  the  dispensatory  virtue  of  his  Messiah- 
dom  only  in  conjunction  with  other  points  of  argument, 
and  that  after  the  apostles  had  done  the  act  for  which 
they  were  reproached  by  the  opponents,  it  may  yet  justly 
be  supposed  that  in  both  they  acted  on  opinions  previously 
gathered  from  the  Master's  instruction,  and  which  they  had 
adopted  in  their  own  conscience.  We  hold  that  alike  their 
slight  of  the  Sabbath  and  neglect  of  the  fasts  were  owing 
to  the  very  same  Messianic  motives,  which  Jesus  gave  forth 
in  his  arguments,  that  he  as  the  Son  of  man  was  lord  of  the 
Sabbath,  and  the  other,  that  fasting  was  not  befitting  in  the 
presence  of  the  Messianic  bridegroom.  These  motives,  we 
maintain,  they  had  assimilated  in  their  minds  a  considera- 
ble time  before  they  plucked  the  ears  on  the  Sabbath,  or 
were  found  to  neglect  the  fasts  and  questioned  by  John's 
disciples  concerning  it.  For  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
Jesus  primarily  and  repeatedly  made  all  things  relating  to 
his  pretended  Messiahdom,  or  which  could  be  brought  to 
bear  on  it,  subjects  of  discussions  with  his  disciples.  And 
it  is  consequently  but  reasonable  to  suppose  that  he  had  at 
some  time  previous  to  that  Sabbath  morning  when  the  dis- 
pute with  the  Pharisees  occurred,  reasoned  with  his  dis- 
ciples about  his  Messianic  lordship,  in  order  to  relieve  their 
scruple  on  various  things  known  to  be  forbidden  on  the 
Sabbath  ;  and  also  that  he  held  out  to  them,  already  before 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  I95 

that  inquiry  of  John's  disciples,  the  consideration  of  the  all- 
ingulfing  ecstasy  which  the  presence  of  the  bridegroonti- 
Messiah  must  inspire,  so  as  to  shut  out  the  gloom  and 
mournfulness  of  the  fast.  ^^ 

The  fasts  were  many  in  Israel.  Not  only  was  there  the 
great  Fast  of  the  Atonement  day,  Mosaically  enjoined,  and 
that  with  the  threat  of  "kareth"  extermination  for  its  viola- 
tion, but  there  were  four  other  Scriptural  fast  days,  which 
were  surely  by  common  consent  generally  observed  during 
the  period  of  the  second  Commonwealth,  viz.,  those  of  the 
fourth,  fifth,  seventh  and  tenth  month  respectively,  named 
by  the  prophet  Zechariah,  viii.  19.  They  were  com- 
memorative of  dire  national  calamities.  What  dates  were 
in  Jesus'  time  fixed  for  the  one  or  the  other  of  them,  can 
here  not  be  investigated.  Suffice  it  to  say  that  it  admits 
of  no  doubt,  that  the  Israelites  everywhere  in  Palestine 
then  kept  them,  as  well  as  those  of  the  pro-restoration 
belief  of  our  own  times  still  observe  them.  That  the 
apostles  neglected  these  and  all  other  fasts,  though  perhaps 
not  that  of  the  Atonement  day,  which  may  have  had  as 
awful  a  hold  of  their  conscience  as  of  that  of  every  other 
coreligionist,  appears  from  the  expression  of  the  question,, 
"but  thy  disciples  fast  not"  fib.  14). 

By  such  neglect  they  had  practically  seceded  from  the 
religious  conception  prevailing  in  Israel  since  antiquity, 
that  fasts  (with  prayer)  are  an  efificient  means  of  expiation 
and  atonement.  We  cannot  here  enlarge  on  this  subject, 
but  will  summarily  state  that  from  the  many  notices  in  the 
Bible  and  the  Apocrypha,  as  also  from  the  Rabbinical 
literature,  fasts  were  a  fixed  religious  institution  in  memory 
of  national  catastrophes,  for  deprecating  national,  sectional 
or  only  local  scourges  of  any  kind,  and  for  imploring 
Divine  aid  against  any  perils. 

In  the  centuries  on  the  customs  of  which  the  old  Rabbin- 
ical literature  dilates,  fasts  for  menaced  or  existing 
scourges  were  published   and  enjoined  by   the  ecclesiastical 


196  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

authorities.  To  resist  them  by  non-compliance  was,  indeed, 
no  culpable  act  of  religious  recreancy.  But  it  showed  at 
any  rate  a  decided  repudiation  of  the  aforesaid  religious 
conception. 

That  in  the  time  of  Jesus  all  those  occasional  public  fasts 
were  already  a  set  custom,  is  not  to  be  questioned.  The 
apostles  can,  from  the  above  quotation,  not  be  supposed  as 
having  observed  them.  Nor  can  they,  in  view  of  the  same 
quotation,  be  reasonably  assumed,  as  already  remarked 
before,  to  have  paid  any  regard  to  those  mentioned  in 
Zechariah. 

It  might  be  opposed  that  the  above  question  of  John's 
disciples  allows  of  an  allusion  to  self-imposed  private  fasts. 
These  were  doubtless  also  customary  in  those  days.  Not 
only  for  perturbing  dreams,  but  for  conscious  sins,  and  even 
as  supererogatory  penances,  we  are,  from  respective  state- 
ments and  intimations  in  the  Rabbinical  literature,  war- 
ranted to  assume  that  private  fasts  had  been  in  vogue  in 
Jesus'  time.  John's  disciples,  of  the  Essenian  or  an  Essenian- 
like  ascetic  sect,  may  by  their  Master  have  been  taught  to 
undertake  frequent  fasts  in  connection  with  other  exercises 
of  repentance,  that  the  sins  obstructing  the  arrival  of  the 
kingdom  of  Heaven,  to  hasten  which  was  his  arduous  aim, 
would  the  more  thoroughly  be  wiped  away  ;  comp.  Matt. 
xi.  18.  Jesus,  on  the  other  hand,  having  after  following  up 
for  a  time  the  theoretic  teaching  of  John,  arrived  at  the 
self-confident  conclusion  that  he  was  himself  the  real 
Messiah  and  the  practical  inaugurator  of  the  Kingdom, — 
incipient,  but  steadily  growing  under  his  hands, — could,  as 
it  is  to  be  surmised  from  his  answer  to  those  disciples,  not 
see  the  necessity  of  austere  penances  for  the  coming  of  the 
Kingdom  in  the  full  bloom  of  glory.  It  was  already 
blossoming  forth  apace.  To  help  on  its  maturity,  his  own 
recommended  ethical-religious  method,  unencumbered  by 
exterior  rites,  would  suffice.  Besides,  as  he  is  reported  to 
have  argued  against  John's  disciples  ( ib.  v.  15),  he  would 
hold  it  inconsistent  that  "the  children  of  the  bride  chamber 
(the  friends  of  the  groom)  mourn,  as  long  as  the  bridegroom 
is   with   them,"  by   which  title  he,  without  any  shadow  of 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  1 97 

doubt,  meant  to  designate  himself.  Tl)is  construction  of 
the  remonstrance  of  John's  disciples  with  him  would  indeed 
be  admissible,  and  perhaps  commend  itself  in  preference  to 
any  other,  were  it  not  for  the  unambiguous  words  "but  thy 
disciples  fast  not,"  which  allow  of  no  other  interpretation 
than  that  they  slighted  all  Jewish  fasts, —  that  of  Atonement 
day  perhaps  excepted,  as  observed  above. 

That  the  disciples  of  Jesus  had,  while  they  were  con- 
nected with  him,  not  any  regular  devotional  exercises, 
either,  at  least  not  until  the  time  when  they,  according  to 
Luke  (xi.  i ),  asked  him,  "teach  us  to  pray,"  and  received 
in  answer  the  advice  recorded  there  also,  would  appear 
as  conclusive  from  this  quoted  passage.  From  it  is  surely 
to  be  inferred  that  they  had  not  been  practicing  the  three 
fixed  daily  devotions  of  the  orthodox  Jews,  the  ritual  of 
which  had  positively  existed  since  centuries,  nor  those 
initiatory  to  and  closing  the  Sabbaths  and  festivals,  nor  the 
many  other  doxologies  established  for  various  occasions 
and  events. 

Neither  is  it  at  all  certain  that  they,  from  the  time  forth 
when  he,  according  to  Luke,  proposed  to  them,  in  compli- 
ance with  their  request,  a  certain  formula, — the  so-called 
Lord's  prayer, — adopted  the  latter  instead  of  the  traditional 
Jewish  ones,  as  having  to  answer  all  their  devotional  pur- 
poses. That  the  later  Christian  church  appropriated  and 
introduced  it  as  the  set  devotional  formula,  is  by  no  means 
a  convincing  indication  that  his  immediate  disciples  had 
already  adopted  it.  The  relative  gospel  contexts  surely  do 
not  sufficiently  warrant  such  assumption.  For,  as  Keim 
says  ( 1.  c.  iii.  342 ),  the  words  "after  this  manner"  (Matt, 
vi.  9)  mean  "thus  briefly,"  and  "in  such  a  sense;"  and 
Jesus'  directions  are  not,  "  do  pray,"  but  conditional,  "  when 
thou  praj^est"  (  ib.  6).  Keim  urges,  farther,  that  there 
is  no  trace  in  the  New  Testament  that  Jesus  instituted  that 
formula,  which  he  holds  to  be  genuine  though  as  to  its  com- 
position for  the  use  of  his  believers:  it  was  first  named  "the 
legitimate  and  regular  prayer"  by  Tertullian  and  Cyprian. 


198  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

If  there  was  with  the  disciples  of  Jesus  no  ordinary  Jewish 
praying,  can  it  be  imagined  that  they  wore  phylacteries  or 
tassels,  or  afifixed  '  mezuzoth '  at  the  entrances  of  their 
houses,  not  to  say,  of  the  several  apartments  of  them  ? 
As  to  the  first-named  of  these  rites  Keim  remarks  (1.  c.  p. 
343),.  "the  gospels  know  of  prayers  in  the  chambers,  but 
nothing  of  the  phylacteries."  The  same  may  confidently 
be  asserted  regarding  the  two  other  rites.  For  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  true  Israelites  all  those  three  rites  ranked 
about  as  equally  important  and  sanctifying.  They  were 
the  "threefold  cord,"  the  combination  of  which  is  in  the 
Rabbinical  literature  designated  a  safeguard  against  sin 
(B.  Menachoth  f.  43). 

Of  less  consequence  was  indeed  the  disciples'  omission  of 
hand  washing  before  meals,  at  which  the  Pharisees  are 
said  to  have  taken  such  deep  offence,  and  which  was, 
according  to  Luke  (xi.  38).  peculiar  to  Jesus,  too.  For 
however  highly  the  Phariseic  extremists,  with  whom 
taharoth,  "  rules  of  ceremonial  purity,"  were  a  foremost 
religious  concern,  rated  it,  it  was  in  truth,  as  to  real  relig- 
ious merit,  inferior  to  any  of  the  aforenamed  observances. 
Moreover,  we  have  shown  in  Note  41,  that  at  the  time  of 
Jesus  the  rite  of  hand-washing  was,  at  most,  in  an  incipient 
state  among  the  lay  class,  and  its  omission  by  the  disciples 
could  therefore  not  have  been  made  a  subject  of  reproach 
by  his  opponents. 

However,  from  all  the  other  points  of  exposition  given 
above,  it  should  clearly  result,  that  the  apostles  and  other 
votaries  gathered  round  Jesus,  had  very  little  practical 
Judaism  about  them.  The  year  or  two  of  Jesus'  public 
activity  was  almost  solely  taken  up  by  his  Messianic  aims 
and  movements.  Jewish  religious  observances  came  in, 
whilst  he  was  engaged  in  this  his  life's  work,  for  a  very 
slim  share  of  attention  on  his  part.  They  were  to  him  of 
secondary  consideration.  And  so  they  were  to  be  and,  we 
insist,  were,  to  the  apostles,  who  are  amply  known  to  have 
proved  themselves  so  very    responsive  to    his  claims  and 


__i 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  1 99. 

teachings  of  Messiahdom.  An  affinity  of  thought  about 
the  latter  gradually  formed  itself  between  teacher  and 
pupils,  which  must  have  prompted  them  to  make  all  other 
things  subserve  to  it,  in  the  same  manner  he  did. 

As  to  the  Sabbath,  too,  they  had,  as  already  observed 
above,  undoubtedly  familiarized  themselves  with  the  theory 
of  his  Messianic  power  of  emancipation  or  temporary  dis- 
pensation from  its  obligation,  namely,  that  he  was  the 
"lord  of  the  Sabbath,"  already  before  he  enunciated  its 
affirmation  against  the  Pharisees.  That  they  acted  upon 
this  affirmation  on  more  than  one  occasion  with  that  laxity 
of  observance  which  its  import  and  scope  would  convey  to 
their  Messianically  excited  minds,  may  safely  be  presumed. 

In  this  connection  we  will  be  permitted  to  give  to  the 
reader  another  of  our  views,  which  he  will  hold  at  once 
important  and  pertinent  enough  to  be  subjoined  in  this 
place.  We  maintain  that  a  distinction  is  to  be  made 
between  Jesus'  address  to  the  people  at  large  who  were 
gradually  to  be  gained  over  to  and  educated  in  his  Mes- 
sianic system,  and  the  teaching  to  his  narrower  circle  of 
adherents.  The  latter  he  would,  on  Messianic  grounds 
bearing  as  well  on  the  present  as  on  the  future,  wholly 
dispense  from  serious  care  about  Jewish  observances.  In 
the  then  imagined  state  of  fast  transition  to  the  new  order 
of  things, — the  kingdom  of  Heaven  with  the  rule  of  the 
Messiah,  resurrection,  Judgment,  and  recreated  world  for 
the  tsadikim  "  righteous," — their  engrossing  care  should  be 
turned  to,  and  such  things  be  done  for,  the  preparation 
towards  it,  as  would  be  most  expedient  for  making  the 
balance  of  Judgment  dip  in  their  favor,  that  they  would  be 
allotted  the  privilege  of  entering  that  future  world.  The 
close  followers  of  Jesus  would  indeed,  from  every  evidence 
in  the  gospels,  devote  themselves  with  absorbing  zeal  to 
the  problem  of  the  Kingdom  with  all  its  appurtenances  of 
doctrine  and  hope.  For  the  uninitiated,  however,  that  is, 
those  standing  yet  at  some  distance  from,  though  fairly 
susceptible  to,  the  belief  in  his  Messiahdom,  a  discreet 
indulgence  of  their  customary  adherence  to  ceremonial 
religion  had  to  be  devised  and  observed.     In  this  way  we 


200  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

can,  e.  g.,  account,  on  the  one  side,  for  the  dispensation 
from  fasting  which  he  saw  proper  to  give  to  his  disciples 
(Matt.  ix.  15),  and,  on  the  other,  for  his  at  least  provisional 
allowance  for  it  in  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  (ib.  vi.  16). 
The  latter,  we  propose,  was  intended  for  outside  hearers 
who  were  yet  ceremonially  scrupulous  and  diffident  to  join 
his  band,  for  the  notorious  deviation  from  orthodox 
Judaism  that  subsisted  within  it.  The  same  explanation 
may  fairly  be  given  regarding  his  stern  and  sharp  repudia- 
tion of  the  material  Temple  worship,  as  contrasted  with 
his  provisional  countenancing  of  sacrifice  in  the  Sermon 
(ib.  V.  23,  24),  and  the  often  quoted  advice  to  the  leper, 
ib.  viii.  4. 

And  the  same  holds  good  to  explain  his  fierce  arraign- 
ment of  the  Phariseic-Rabbinical  traditions  (ib.  xv.  3  sq.), 
and  the  opposite  encouragement  of  the  people  to  heed  the 
injunctions  of  the  Phariseic  teachers  and  sages  (ib.  xxiii.  3). 

To  divide  his  teaching  into  esoteric  and  exoteric 
branches  is  by  no  means  hazardous.  It  is  not  only  perfectly 
warranted  by  Matt.  xiii.  11.  (comp.  ib.  x.  27),  but  analogies  of 
this  method  are  offered  in  the  secular  philosophies  of 
paganism,  as  well  as  in  the  pursuit  of  old  Rabbinical 
school-learning. 

By  this  view  we  would  not  only  have  gained  a  mode  of 
harmonizing  the  partly  conservative  utterances  of  Jesus 
about  some  ceremonial  rites,  with  others  showing  his 
antagonism  to  them,  but  also  be  able  to  trace  more 
justly  the  disciples'  ceremonial  indifference  to  that  contin- 
uous strain  of  Messianic  reasoning,  which  is  naturally  sup- 
posed to  have  been,  within  the  confines  of  the  narrower 
circle,  carried  to  as  high  a  pitch  as  would  correspond  to 
the  overwrought  thoughts  of  the  Master  and  the  feverish 
mood  of  the  disciples.  The  latter  being  continuously 
trained  in  his  all-absorbing  Messianic  teaching,  and 
initiated  in  its  mysteries,  would  for  this  reason  all  the  more 
readily  take  to  his  mysterious  dispensation  of  themselves 
from  ceremonial  observances  which  he  offered  to  them,  as 
long  as  they  devoutly  gave  themselves  up  to  the  sole 
spiritual   occupation   with  the   questions   of  his    Messianic 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  20I 

kingdom.  And  to  them,  too,  we  surmise,  the  claim  of  his 
Messianic  lordship  over  the  Sabbath,  uttered  in  the  above- 
discussed  controversy,  was  at  the  point  of  time  when  it 
occurred,  not  new  any  more.  They  had  without  doubt 
privately  heard  it  before,  and  were  completely  conversant 
with  it,  so  much  so  that  they  acted  on  its  strength  in  the 
way  stated  in  the  record  of  that  controversy,  in  Matt.  xii.  i. 


CHAPTER  XV. 


THE   SABBATH   WITH   THE   DISCIPLES   OF    JESUS   AFTER 
HIS   DEATH. 

The  Master  had  passed  away.  His  execution  had  cast  a 
deep  consternation  in  the  hearts  of  his  faithful  apostles  and 
adherents.  However,  they  were  not  left,  or  did  not  allow 
themselves  to  be  left,  to  utter  despair.  Though  parted 
from  him  in  reality,  they  were  united  to  him  in  sentiment. 
If  his  suffering  and  parting  were  a  bitter  blow  to  their 
sympathetic  hearts,  it  was  yet,  on  the  other  hand,  as  they 
firmly  believed,  the  stepping  stone  to  the  structure  of  the 
Kingdom,  which  they  expected  soon  to  see  fully  realized 
by  the  Master's  coming  again  in  glory  and  at  the  head  of 
angels. 

The  intelligence  of  his  resurrection  on  the  third  day 
coming  to  them  from  two  of  his  female  devotees  (Matt, 
xxviii.  8),  made  an  end  to  their  brooding  over  the  hard 
stroke  visited   on   them,  and   set    them  thinking    over  the 


202  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

gradual  verification  of  his  various  Messianic  predictions. 
Dejection  thus  gave  way  to  hopeful  reflections,  and  they 
began  to  compose  themselves  again.  Jesus  himself  had, 
after  being  apprised  of  the  Baptist's  fatal  end  which  pro- 
duced in  him  the  presentiment  that  his  own  could  be 
neither  much  different  nor  very  distant  (see  Matt.  xvii. 
9-13,  and  comp.  Luke  xxiv.  6,  7),  prognosticated  his  coming 
resurrection  to  three  of  his  apostles,  and  foretold  it  again 
to  all  of  them  as  to^happen  on  the  third  day  (with  refer- 
ence, we  suppose,  to  Hosea  vi.  2),  before  his  entry  into 
Jerusalem  (Matt.  xx.  19).  This  prediction  the  Son  of  man 
had,  as  they  believed,  made  good;  see  Matt,  xxviii.6.  It  was 
even  tangibly  proved  to  the  eleven,  as  they  fancied  in  their 
overwrought  spirits,  when  they  had  followed  the  advice  of 
going  immediately  to  Galilee,  where  the  resuscitated 
Messiah  would  appear  to  them  again  (ib.  v.  16  sq.). 

His  other  prediction  about  himself,  that  he  would  be 
sitting  at  the  right  hand  of  power  (Matt.  xxvi.  64,  Mark 
xiv.  62), — "  power,"  Geburah,  was  also  by  the  Rabbis  of  old 
often  used  to  denote  the  Deity, — was  likewise  beginning  to 
be  consummated.  For  he  was,  as  they  believed,  after  that 
appearance  to  them,  "  received  up  into  Heaven  and  sat 
down  at  the  right  hand  of  God  "  (  Mark  xvi.  19  ;  comp.  as 
to  the  same  dogma,  at  a  later  period.  Acts  v.  31,  vii.  55,  56 ). 
All  that  yet  remained  to  be  fulfilled  was,  his  second  Advent, 
which  he  had  predicted  to  be  in  the  clouds  of  Heaven 
(Matt.  xxvi.  64). 

And  it  was  to  this  future  coming  as  the  all-powerful 
Messiah,  so  repeatedly  taught  them  in  his  lifetime,  that  they 
eagerly  looked  forward.  The  second  Advent  was  as  fixed 
a  persuasion  with  him,  as  was  that  of  his  future  sitting  on 
the  right  hand  of  God,  which  he  brought  forward  by  the 
application  to  himself  of  Ps.  ex.  i,  which  psalm,  in  passing, 
he  was  particularly  infatuated  with,  since  he  deduced  from 
it  his  own  divine  lordship,  and,  implicitly,  his  divine  son- 
ship,  too  (see  Matt.  xxii.  43-45)  ;  and  as  was,  further,  the 
self-conscious  exaltation  of  himself  to  the  dignity  of  the 
Messiah  in  his  first  or  one  of  his  first  public  sermons,  by 
applying  to  himself  the  words  of  Isaiah  xlii.,  picturing  forth 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  203 

the  destiny  of  the  "servant;"  see  Luke  iv.  16-21.  Those 
three  points  of  Messianic  dogma  were  interconnected.  The 
last-named  was  the  starting-point,  the  other  was  the  inter- 
mediate, and  preparatory  to  the  first-named. 

The  resurrection  and  the  ascension  having,  as  they  fancied, 
come  to  pass,  which  preliminaries  were  in  their  minds 
unmistakable  phases  of  the  developing  Kingdom,  the  height 
of  which  was  to  be  the  Master's  coming  again  from  Heaven, 
they  could  partly  console  themselves  for  the  bitter  loss 
they  had  endured  in  his  personal  withdrawal.  Meanwhile 
they  were  not  entirely  left  to  themselves.  They  were  not 
wholly  abandoned  by  their  Master.  The  belief  was,  that 
he  promised  to  be  with  them  "alway,  even  unto  the  end  of 
the  world"  (Matt,  xxviii.  20).  Furthermore,  his  sorely 
missed  presence  was,  as  the  notion  had  formed  itself 
soon  after  his  demise,  supplied  by  the  attendance  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  which,  as  the  pretense  was,  Jesus  "hath  poured 
forth"  from  his  celestial  station  (Acts  ii.  33),  and  this  not 
only  on  the  apostles,  but  on  all  that  had  joined  or  would 
join  (see  ib.  v.  38)  the  ranks  of  the  believers.  So  much  was 
this,  indeed,  the  prevalent  presumption  after  his  death,  that 
in  Mark  (xvi.  16-18),  the  promise  is  put  in  the  mouth  of 
Jesus  after  his  alleged  resurrection,  that  all  baptized 
believers  would  subsequently  become  perfect  thaumatur- 
gists,  competent  not  only  to  cure  diseases  and  cast  out 
devils,  but  to  speak  in  all  thinkable  languages,  and  also 
proof  both  against  the  sting  of  serpents  and  the  deadly  grip 
of  poison.  In  addition,  the  mere  laying  of  hands  by  the 
apostles  on  baptized  converts  passed  for  having  the  virtue 
of  imparting  to  them  the  Holy  Ghost  (Acts  viii.  17). 

As  to  the  healing  effects  of  their  thaumaturgic  efforts  the 
supposition  was,  that  they  would  be  unfailing,  provided  the 
person  on  whom  the  supernatural  act  was  to  be  performed, 
had  faith  in  the  name  Jesus  :  for  then,  as  is  to  be  gathered 
from  the  theory  put  forth  by  Peter  (Acts  iii.  16),  the  name 
Jesus  retroacted  in  making  that  person  whole. 


204  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

That  the  spell  in  magical  cures  centered,  let  us  here 
observe,  in  the  name  Jesus,  appears  from  various  Jewish  as 
well  as  extraneous  sources,  see  Jer.  Sabb.  ch.  xiv.;  Tosifta 
Cholin  ii..  and  comp.  Acts  iv.  30,  also  v.  41.  Therapeutic 
marvels  were  the  indispensable  attendants  of  Messianic 
agitations.  They  inseparably  accompanied  the  cry  of  the 
Kingdom,  alike  with  John  the  Baptist  and  Jesus.  The 
same  combination  was  enjoined  by  the  latter  on  his  apos- 
tles (Matt.  X.  7,  8),  which  they,  indeed,  faithfully  discharged 
during,  and  most  extensively  after,  his  lifetime.  Even  the 
philosophical  Paul  could  not  dispense  with  miracles  in  the 
course  of  preaching  his  gospel,  see  2  Cor.  xii.  12,  Rom.  xv. 
19.  In  fact  miracles,  in  especial  therapeutic  ones,  were  the 
prominent  characteristic  of  Christianity,  throughout  the 
whole  apostolic  and   postapostolic  ages. 

The  apostles  could,  after  the  death  of  Jesus,  best  beguile 
the  dreary  days  of  the  personal  separation  from  him,  by 
taking  to  the  practice  of  those  "signs  of  an  apostle"  (so  in. 
2  Cor.  1.  c).  They  could  pursue  no  more  suitable  occupa- 
tion than  this,  to  make  the  melancholy  suspense  concerning 
his  return  from  Heaven  fairly  supportable.  And,  what  was 
chiefest  in  the  continuation  of  the  Master's  Messianic  work, 
they,  could,  with  the  aid  of  such  miraculous  performances, 
propagate,  like  unto  him  in  his  lifetime,  the  belief  in  his 
Messiahdom  with  the  safest  promise  of  success.  Compare 
Origen,  Against  Celsus,  i.  46,  who  surely  says  the  true 
thing  when  he  asserts:  "The  apostles  could  not  without 
mighty  acts  and  miracles  have  induced  those  to  whom  they 
gave  new  doctrines  and  precepts,  to  leave  their  paternal, 
and  embrace  the  new  ones,  with  great  perils  to  their  lives." 

This  combined  Messianic  profession  of  preaching  the 
Kingdom  and  healing,  they  doubtless  followed  with  ardent 
endeavor,  as  soon  as  they  had  returned- from  Jerusalem  to 
their  native  district,  Galilee.  And,  we  hold,  this  event 
took  place  shortly  after  Jesus'  execution.  For  Jerusalem 
will,  after  the  dire  experience  they  had  passed  through, 
not  have  appeared  to  them  as  a  safe  abiding  place,  if  they 
were  to  continue  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus'  Messiahdom. 
This  seems   even   to   be   intimated    in    Matt,   xxviii.  7,    10. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTOKV.  205 

The  true  substance  of  the  statements  in  these  passages 
seems  to  us  to  be,  that  the  instinct  of  the  women  nearest 
to  Jesus,  as  well  as  the  shocked  sentiment  of  his  immediate 
family,  suggested  to  the  entire  company  that  had  espoused 
his  Messianic  cause,  to  make  for  home  again  and  await 
there  the  progress  of  Messianic  events. 

This  company  will  without  doubt  have  soon  begun  to 
establish  themselves  into  a  regular  community  or  Church. 
They  consisted  of  Jesus'  brothers  and  mother,  and  the  apos- 
tles (Acts  i.  14;  on  the  latter's  names  see  Matt.  x.  2-4,  with 
which  compare  John  xxi.  2  and  Acts  i.  26),  and  the  rest  of 
Jesus-believers  attached  to  them,  who  were  all  of  them 
Galileans,  too  (see  Acts  i.  11,  ii.  7).  The  number  of  this 
whole  first  Christian  body  may  not  exaggeratedly  have 
been  stated  as  being  one  hundred  and  twenty  persons  (ib. 
i  15),  considering  that  a  good  number  of  women  had  also 
joined  the  Christian  brotherhood  (see  Luke  viii.  3,  where 
the  company  of  Jesus  is  stated  to  have  included  three 
women  who  are  given  by  name,  and  "many  others;"  comp. 
ib.  xxiv.  10,  also  i  Cor.  ix.  5).  Possibly  there  were  "above 
five  hundred  brethren,"  as  Paul  mentions  (i  Cor.  xv.  6). 

This  Christian  body  most  likely  settled  themselves  in 
the  town  of  Capernaum,  which  had  also  been  Jesus'  fixed 
central  station  of  activity.  That  Galilee  had  a  settlement 
of  Jewish  Christians  in  the  first  third  of  the  second  century, 
appears  from  a  passage  in  the  Midrash,  which  we  will 
adduce  at  a  later  point.  Keim  (1.  c,  v.  2)  observes,  too, 
with  reference  to  i  Cor.  xv.  6,  and  Acts  ix.  31,  that  a  Gali- 
lean church  consisting  of  Jesus'  adherents  from  that  pro- 
vince existed  in  the  apostolic  period.  We  may  in  view  of 
these  notices  the  more  properly  assume  that  the  seat  of  the 
first  Christian  church  was  Capernaum,  and  that  this  town 
was  selected,  out  of  deference  to  the  memory  of  the  Master 
who  had  made  it  his  home,  by  the  returning  Christian  com- 
pany soon  after  his  departure,  as  the  resort  and  plantation 
of  apostolic  Christianity.  The  settlement  of  the  apostles 
and  other  leading  personages  of  the  Palestinian  Jewish 
Christian  church  in  Jerusalem  occurred,  we  maintain,  at  a 
later  date. 

(6; 


206  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

That  the  apostles  and  other  early  professors  of  Chris- 
tianity were,  after  the  death  of  Jesus,  watched  with  intense 
concern  both  by  the  representative  schoolmen  and  the 
ecclesiastic-judicial  magistracy,  suffers  no  doubt.  Not 
only  was  any  new  irritation  of  the  Roman  authorities  by 
Messianic  stirring  to  be  cautiously  prevented,  but  the 
apostolic  propaganda,  having  assumed  a  character  antagon- 
istic to  the  fundamental  principle  of  Judaism  by  the  more 
and  more  growing  deification  of  Jesus,  was  to  be  met  with 
vigorous  resolution.  His  divinity  came,  in  consequence  of 
his  own  various  relative  claims  uttered  in  his  lifetime,  and 
in  especial  through  his  august  pretension  of  being  the  Mes- 
siah, the  son  of  God  (Matt.  xxvi.  64.  Mark  xiv.  62,  and 
comp.  Matt.  xvi.  16,  17;  xxii.  42-45),  to  be  an  article  of 
faith  with  his  adherents  after  his  death.  Not  only  in  Paul's 
writings  and  the  fourth  gospel  is  Jesus  elevated  to  the 
quality  of  a  superhuman  individual,— in  them  he  is  even 
exalted  to  the  eminence  of  divine  pre-existence. — but  the 
dogma  of  his  being  the  son  of  God  was  held  by  all  the 
Jewish  Christians.  Even  the  P^bionites,  though  they  denied 
Jesus'  sameness  and  consubstantiality  with  God.  because 
he  was  "begotten,"  have  adhered  to  the  title  son  of  God.  as 
proper  to  him;  see  Epiphanius,  Haer.  xxx.  13.  16  and  the 
Clementine  Homilies. 

That  passage  in  Matt,  xxviii.  18,  "All  authority  hath 
been  given  unto  me  in  Heaven  and  on  earth,"  which  is 
surely  a  later  interpolation,  does  yet  serve  as  a  sufficient 
evidence  of  the  construction  put  by  the  believers  of  Jesus 
on  his  supernal  state  after  his  death.  They  conceived  it 
not  alone  as  one  of  divine  majesty,  but  of  a  most  compre- 
hensive divine  sway.  They  attributed  to  him  a  divine 
domination  which,  in  their  exuberantly  admiring  souls, 
increased  in  magnitude  with  the  increase  of  time.  It  grew 
brighter,  the  more  the  remoteness  of  time  had  dimmed  the 
memory  of  his  terrestrial  life.  That  this  was  to  the  ortho- 
dox Jews  the  most  obnoxious  and  alarming  pirt  of  the  pro- 
fession of  Jesus' early  apostles  and  adherents,  is  unquestion- 
able. It  was  not  the  avowing  by  all  the  earlier  Jewish 
Christians  of  tlie  dorma  of  his  sitting  on  the  riiiht   hand  of 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  20/ 

God  in  itself  that  excited  the  profound  and  bitter  antipathy 
of  the  orthodox  Jews  against  them.  Whenever  that  dogma 
was — if  it  ever  was — abstracted  from  the  additional  notion 
of  his  exercising  a  divine  power  in  his  sainted  state,  it 
could  not  well  have  had  a  moment  of  Jewish  religious 
offence.  In  this  case  it  could  have  been  held  no  more 
heterodox  than  was  the  saying  of  the  Rabbis  in  the  Talmud, 
B.  Sabb.  f.  152,  that  "the  souls  of  the  righteous  after  their 
death  are  kept  nidden  by  God  beneath  his  throne  of  glory." 
Compare  also  Josephus,  Wars  iii.  8,  5.  What  made  that 
dogma  so  odious  to  the  orthodox  Jews  was,  that  usually  a 
divine  potency  was  along  with  its  enunciation  assigned  to 
Jesus.  See  especially  Acts  v.  31,  where  Peter  designated 
him  Prince,  Savior,  and  Remitt^er  of  sins;  comp.  also  ib.  x. 
43,  and  the  previous  verse,  where  he  re-asserts  him  as  the 
Judge  at  the  coming  resurrection. 

Connected  with  and  based  on  the  quality  of  remitting  sins 
was,  we  suppose,  the  apostolic  usage  of  the  invocation  of  his 
name  at  magical  cures,  which  has  already  been  noticed 
before.  Since  these  cures  were  the  professional  acts  of  the 
apostles,  such  invocations  must  have  occurred  most  fre- 
quently of  all  their  efforts  at  propagating  their  Christianity, 
and  consequently  have  most  often  given  serious  scandal  to 
the  orthodox  Jews  and  their  authorities.  Under  the  same 
category  came  the  speaking  or  teaching  "in  his  name;"  see 
ib.  iv.  18,  and  in  other  places.  All  this  shows  sufficiently 
that  a  high  degree  of  divinity  was  ascribed  to  Jesus  already 
at  the  earlier  epoch  of  the  apostolic  church.  This  must 
have  had  an  appalling  effect  on  the  orthodox  Jewish  peo- 
ple everywhere.  They  were  to  nothing  more  sensitive  and 
vulnerable  than  to  the  infringement  of  their  monotheistic 
principle.  They  were  by  nothing  more  deeply  galled  than 
by  the  defection  of  any  of  their  community  from  this  vital 
condition  of  their  faith, — a  faith  which  they  v/ere  at  any 
time  ready  to  seal  with  their  own  blood. 

On  the  reprimands,  menaces  and  chastisements  (on  the 
latter  see  Matt.  x.  17,  xxiii.  34;  Acts  v.  40  and  comp.  2 
Cor.  xi.  24),  which  such  deifying  attitude  of  Jewish 
believers    in    Jesus   have    called     forth,    we    can     here   not 


208  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

expatiate.  The  conspiring  causes  of  criminal  inquisition 
made  against  some,  and  of  mortal  doom  executed  on  a  few 
other  primitive  Jewish  Christians,  we  have  surveyed  else- 
where. We  will  here  only  state  in  general  that  serious 
collisions  of  the  disciples  of  Jesus  with  orthodox  Jews  had 
inevitably  to  ensue  from  their  heretical  doctrines.  Even  if 
their  conduct  was  not  of  a  defiant  or  insolent  anti-Jewish 
nature,  such,  for  instance,  as  were  the  assaults  of  the 
impetuous  Hellenistic  Christian,  Stephen,  they  must  have 
felt  in  their  hearts  a  vehement  sting  at  the  mere  profession 
of  those  doctrines. 

That  collisions  about  Jewish  religious  observances  too 
will,  even  after  the  Master  had  departed,  have  occurred, 
we  may  take  for  granted.  ,For  we  hold  that,  in  the  main, 
the  apostles  trod,  as  to  them,  in  the  steps  of  the  Master. 
Consequently  we  have  to  maintain  that  ceremonial  rites 
were  to  them,  as  to  him,  of  a  subordinate  import,  as  com- 
pared with  the  paramount  cause  of  the  Messianic  kingdom 
of  HeaVen  and  the  preparation  towards  it.  He  had  taught 
them  their  relative  unimportance,  and  they  would  doubt- 
less bring  the  lessons  to  bear  on  their  whole  line  of  con- 
duct. We  have  already  in  previous  chapters  adduced  and 
discussed  instances  partly  of  their  disregard  and  partly  of 
their  levity  as  to  the  Jewish  ritual  and  customs.  That  now, 
after  the  removal  of  the  Master,  a  change  should  have  set 
in  in  their  sense  and  estimate  of  ceremonial  religious 
duties,  is  not  probable.  All  that  might  be  proposed  in  this 
respect  is, — and  we  will  treat  of  this  hereafter, — that  they, 
after  the  death  of  Jesus,  became  more  observant  of  them 
out  of  policy  and  prudent  yielding  to  unpropitious  circum- 
stances. 

Let  us  assert  here  that,  in  truth,  they  were  and  remained 
Jews  to  the  core  as  to  the  belief  in  the  obligation  of  the 
sacred  sign  of  the  covenant  and  seal  of  the  national- 
religious  communion,  circumcision.  They  held  it  so  indis- 
putable that  they  would  even  not  receive  any  Gentile  con- 
verts as  on  an  equal  footing  with  themselves,  who  did  not 
submit  to  that  rite  and  with  it  to  that  part  of  the  Mosaic- 
Jewish  ceremonial,  which  had  yet  authority  with  them;  see 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  209 

Acts  XV.  I,  5.  In  the  latter  verse  that  insistance  is,  indeed, 
ascribed  only  to  certain  of  the  Phariseic  Christians.  But 
since  its  author  attests  himself  the  demand  of  circumcision 
for  Gentiles  on  the  part  of  "  certain  men  "  who  had  come 
from  Judea  to  Antioch,  which  certain  men  were  assuredly 
no  other  than  those  sent  by  the  head  of  the  Christian 
church,  James  (Gal.  ii.  12),  it  is  apparent  that  it  was  a 
sentiment  and  principle  of  the  entire  body  of  the  Jewish 
Christians,  and  that  consequently  his  statement  in  v.  5. 
limiting  it  to  "'  certain  of  the  sect  of  the  Pharisees  who 
believed,"  is  inaccurate. 

The  apostles  were,  too,  as  Baur  urges  ('Paul'  i.  203), 
equally  as  antagonistic  to  Paul  for  his  antinomian  teachings 
among  Jews  and  Gentiles  in  Grecian  communities,  as  the 
orthodox  Jews  themselves  were.  He  deduces  this  not  only 
from  Acts  xxi.  21,  but  also  from  Gal.  ii.  12,  and. supports  it, 
further,  by  reference  to  the  hostile  feeling  of  the  Ebionites 
against  him.  He  remarks  there  also  (p.  204),  that  the 
author  of  Acts  himself  presented  against  his  will  the  his- 
torical truth,  that  "the  Jewish  Christians  in  Jerusalem  saw 
in  the  apostle  Paul  an  apostate  from  the  Law,  and  a 
preacher  of  this  apostasy  among  both  Jews  and  Gentiles." 

The  SabSath,  also  a  sign  of  the  Divine  covenant  and  with 
circumcision  forming,  in  the  consciousness  of  faithful  Israel, 
the  two  greatest  fundamental  rites  of  Judaism,  the  apostles 
held  in  reverence,  too.  That  is  to  say,  they  estimated  it 
as  of  that  authority  which,  while  they  did  not,  as  little  as 
their  Master,  hold  it  Divine,  the  reverend  antiquity  of  its 
origin,  as  well  as  the  traditional  conception  of  its  being  a 
corner-stone  of  Israel's  religious  constitution,  and  its  con- 
tinuously manifest  sacred  import,  almost  absolutely  brought 
with  them.  With  this  consisted,  on  the  other  hand, 
primarily  because  they  did  not  hold  it  as  having  come  from 
God,  that  arbitrary  deviation  from  its  observance  which  is 
directly  recorded  about  them  (see  above). 

The  Mosaic  festivals  they  no  doubt  kept  also,  though 
certainly  regardless  of  the  sacrificial  ritual  ordained  for 
them.  And,  we  may  mention  here,  as  little  as  they  can  be 
supposed  to  have  attended  to  t'ne  offering  of  victims  pre- 


210  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

scribed  for  individuals  on  the  three  pilgrimage  feasts,  so 
little  will  they  have  cared  about  the  non-sacrificial  obla- 
tions required  to  be  brought  to  Jerusalem,  such  as  the 
so-called  second  tithe,  the  fruit  of  trees  and  vines  in  the 
fourth  year  of  their  plantation,  and  the  first-fruits,  which 
latter  were  portions  due  to  the  priests  and  were  solemnly 
borne  into  the  city  and  Temple,  their  regular  appointed 
season  being  from  Pentecost  till  autumn.  (According  to 
Philo  a  sort  of  festival  was  made  of  the  occasion  at  the  end 
of  every  fifth  year.)  That  they  will  already  in  the  first  few 
years  subsequent  to  the  death  of  Jesus  have  substituted  for 
the  sacrificial  Passover  ceremonial  on  the  eve  of  the  four- 
teenth Nisan,  the  sacrament  of  the  Eucharist,  is  most 
likely.  The  (  real )  apostle  John  who,  by  the  way,  has  no 
doubt  contemporarily  with  Paul  set  himself  industriously 
to  Jewish  Christian  mission-work  among  the  Gentiles  of 
Asia  Minor,  as  likewise  Peter  has,  on  his  part,  done  at  the 
same  period  in  Antioch  and  other  cities  of  Syria,  and  even 
in  Corinth  (see  on  this  i  Cor.  i.  12),  as,  possibly,  also  in 
Rome,  seems,  from  various  reliable  notices  (as  to  which  the 
writer  refers  to  Hilgenfeld,  'The  History  of  Heretics,  etc./ 
p.  601  sq.,  and  to  Baur,  'Ecclesiastical  History,  etc.,'  p. 
156  sq.\  to  have  introduced  this  rite,  with  the  Mosaic  date 
of  the  Pascha,  among  those  Asiatic  churches.  To  it  they, 
indeed,  clung  immovably  for  many  centuries  afterwards. 
Now  if  the  Christian  Pascha  with  the  Mosaic  date  was 
habitual  with  Gentile  converts,  much  more  justly  may  we 
assume  this  date  as  unalterable  within  the  apostolic  Jewish 
Christian  church.  Again,  in  this  church  there  was  doubt- 
less observed  the  eating  of  unleavened  bread  at  that 
religious  love-repast  (see  on  the  same  observance  by  the 
Ebionites,  Epiphanius,  Haer.  xxv.  16,  in  Hilgenfeld,  1.  c.  p. 
432),  and,  we  presume,  also  during  the  rest  of  the  seven 
days  of  the  feast,  which  there  is  every  reason  to  believe 
that  they  did  not  leave  off  celebrating  in  all  after  time,  and 
that   fairly    in    accordance   with   the    Mosaic    appointment. 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY'.  211 

On  the  whole,  then,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  in  the 
apostolic  sphere  the  feast  of  Passover  was  kept,  as  to  date 
and  partly  as  to  ceremonial  rites,  conformably  to  the 
Mosaic  import. 

The  feast  of  Pentecost,  too,  may  at  a  very  early  date 
have  by  the  apostles  been  infused  with  Christian  elements. 
That  they  celebrated  it,  on  the  whole,  for  its  being  an 
ancient  Mosaic  institution,  appears  from  Acts  ii.  i.  While 
we  can  not  lay  much  score  by  any  of  this  author's  reports, 
it  is  yet  quite  possible  that  the  alleged  t-ffluence  from  the 
sublimated  Jesus  of  the  Holy  Spirit  over  the  devout  assem- 
bly (ib.  V.  33),  put  by  him  on  the  day  of  the  first  Pentecost 
after  Jesus'  death,  has  at  any  rate  the  historical  basis  of  the 
ecstatic  belief  existing  with  those  gathered  together  for 
devotional  exercises,  that  such  imparting  of  the  spirit  did 
really  then  take  place.  That  they  will  thenceforth  have 
annually  celebrated  this  pretended  event  on  the  feast  of 
Pentecost,  we  can  readily  believe.  But  we  have  at  the  same 
time  to  hold  firmly  to  the  view  that,  strongly  tinctured 
with  Christian  bearing  as  that  old  Jewish  feast  had  no 
doubt  become  to  them,  they  never  attempted  to  remove  it 
from  its  Mosaic  foundation.  Both  the  Mosaic  and  the  new, 
Christian,  purport  may  have  been  blended  in  their  concep- 
tion and  usage;  though,  we  farther  incline  to  think,  rather 
with  a  preponderance  of  the  Christian,  because  the  Mosaic 
could,  for  their  opposition  to  the  Temple  ceremonial,  offer 
to  them  no  clear  motive  for  sacred  observance.  It  is  there- 
fore possible  that  the  Mosaic  character  of  the  feast  con- 
sisted with  them  merely  in  the  perpetuation  of  its  pre- 
scribed date. 

As  to  the  feast  of  Booths,  we  have  no  reason  for  ques- 
tioning its  observance  by  the  apostolic  church,  either. 
Whether  some  Christian  elements  were  mixed  with  it,  we  , 
are  not  able  to  affirm,  because  every  relative  information 
or  indication  is  wanting.  With  regard  to  the  feast  of  the 
first  day  of  Tishri,  we  may  justly  surmise  that  it  shared 
attention    with   the   rest   of  the    traditional  Jewish    solemn 


2  12  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

days.  Whether  they  fasted  on  the  Day  of  Atonement,  on 
this  we  reflected  already  before.  The  doubt  of  their  having 
done  so  in  Jesus'  lifetime  may,  as  will  hereafter  appear, 
not  attach  to  them  for  the  period  after  his  death. 

To  these  considerations  we  may  add  some  indirect  evi- 
dence from  the  following  places  of  Paul's  Epistles.  In  Gal. 
iv.  10,  he  arraigns  those  converts  having  relapsed  into 
Judaizing  by  the  observance  of  solemn  days  and  seasons. 
In  Coloss.  ii.  i6,  he  takes  issue  with  him  who  would  cavil 
with  his  fellow-believer  about  his  non-observance  of  "holy- 
day,  new.  moon  or  Sabbath;"  compare  also  Rom.  xiv.  6. 
Now  the  cogent  consequence  from  those  two  places  (the 
Ep.  Rom.  is  by  some  notable  authors  of  our  day  held  as 
written  to  the  Jewish  Christians  of  Rome,  and  could 
accordingly  not  be  turned  to  account  in  the  argument  we 
here  propound)  is,  that  if  Gentile  converts  were  observant 
of  the  Jewish  sacred  days,  much  more  must  their  teachers 
from  the  Judaic  church,  the  apostles  or  their  agents,  have 
been  observers  of  them.  That  Paul's  reference  should  in 
those  passages  have  been  exclusively  to  the  Ebionites  as  a 
class  of  sectarians,  cannot  be  upheld,  as  we  will  by  and  by 
demonstrate.  Even  if  it  had  been,  it  would  not  invalidate 
our  argument.  For  the  E^bionite  missionaries^  whom  Paul 
may  have  held  polemically  in  view,  can  have  been  no  other 
than  those  authorized  and  delegated  by  the  leaders  of  the 
apostolic  church,  who  were  themselves  largely  imbued  with 
Essenian  doctrines,  to  preach  the  Jewish  Christian  gospel 
to  the  Gentiles. 

As  to  rules  of  religious  purity  the  apostles  can,  for  their 
unquestionable  opposition  to  the  sacrificial  ritual,  not  be 
supposed  as  having  been  straightly  guided  by  the  relative 
ordinances  of  the  Mosaic  code.  In  all  instances  of  personal 
impurity  requiring  sacrifice  (see  Lev.  xii.,  xiv.  xv.),  or  in 
those  for  which  the  "water  of  separation"  is  prescribed 
(  Numb.  xiv.  ),  they  will  consistently  have  omitted  these 
rites.  Still  a  reverent  regard  to  many  Mosaic  propositions 
of  defilement  they  can  fairly  be  expected  to  have  had.  We 
advisedly  say,  many,  and  not.  all,  for  we  cannot  imagine 
that  they  will  in  their  zeal  of  Messianic  propaganda  have, 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  213 

for   instance,  shunned    the  touch  of  a  leper  or  an   innpure 
woman,  any  more  than    their  Master  did.     Nor  could   we 
reconcile  it  in  our  mind  that  they  should  in  their  mission- 
ary intercourse  with  pagans  have  avoided,  even  if  they  felt 
such  anxiety,  every  one  of  those  pollutions  termed  as  such 
in    the  Pentateuch.     Yet    for  all    that    there  is  reasonable 
ground  to  believe  that  they  will  have  looked  to  the  Penta- 
teuch as  the  general  guide  in  matters  of  religious  purity  ; 
see   also   our  Note  34.     While   we  concede  this,    we   have 
nevertheless  to  state  it  as  probable,  that  alike  in  their  doc- 
trinal   and    practical    course    the    Essenic    rules    of   purity 
predominated.     Not  that  they  would  or  could  regularly,  in 
their  public  activity,  carry  into  practice  the  extreme  con- 
ceptions of  purity  of  that  sect,  which,  as  is  well    known, 
left  even  the   Mosaic  ones  behind.     But  there  are  certain 
indications  showing,  that  they  had   Essenic  prepossessions 
and    will,    therefore,    whenever,    as     we    remarked,    their 
Messianic  missionary  work  did  not  interfere,  have  followed 
out    the  Essenic  rules  of   purity  rather  than    the  Mosaic- 
Jewish.     We   will    not,   in    evidence    of    this,    quote    Paul's 
"Handle  not.... nor  touch"  ( Col.  ii.  21,22).     For  these 
phrases  admit  as  much  of  a  direct  Mosaic  as  of  an  Essenic 
or  Ebionite  bearing.     Indeed,  Paul  may  there  have  alluded 
to  some  respective  prohibitions  explicitly  set  forth   in  the 
Pentateuch.     But  there  are  other  pertinent  indications  for 
it.     We  have  in  the  before-cited  Note  endeavored  to  make 
it  probable,  that  three  out  of  the  four  apostolic  decrees  had 
pre-eminently  an   Essenic  basis.     And   if  we  be  permitted 
to   retrace    the   many  injunctions   of  bodily   purity   in    the 
Ebionitic    Clementine    literature    to    the   apostolic    church 
which,  as  may  be  set  down  for  certain,  prominently  leant 
on   Essenism,  we   are  all   the  more   entitled   to  assert   the 
postulate,  that  within  it  the  Essenic  rules  of  purity  enjoyed 
a  superior  estimation.     Was  not,  it  may  yet  be  observed, 
the  rite  of  baptism  itself,  so  greatly  exalted  by  the  apostles, 
originally  a  prominently  Essenic  or,  at  any  rate,  Essenic- 
related  symbol  of  regeneration.^ 


214  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

Connected  with  the  rules  of  purity,  alike  in  the  spirit  of 
Mosaism  and  evidently  also,  to  judge  from  the  Clementine 
Homilies  (vii.  4,  8),  in  the  thoughts  of  the  Ebionites,  were 
the  Jewish  food  restrictions.  It  is  safe  to  presuppose  the 
same  connection  in  the  minds  of  the  apostles.  As  to  the 
observance  of  those  restrictions,  the  consequence  is  easily 
drawn  from  those  four  decisions  for  proselytes  to  Chris- 
tianity recorded  in  Acts  xv.  (see  on  this,  Part  First,  p.  118, 
and  Note  34  of  the  present  treatise),  that  they  surely 
abstained  for  themselves  with  horror  from  those  kinds  of 
flesh  named  there  as  part  of  the  resolutions  of  warning  to 
converts.  For  if  the  apostles  ordered  those  points  for  con- 
verts from  paganism,  much  more  must  themselves  have 
heeded  them.  To  those  kinds  may  at  once  be  superadded 
the  flesh  of  dead  animals,  which  the  Peter  of  the  Clemen- 
tines, too,  joins  to"  the  rest  of  restraints  appointed  for  Gen- 
tile converts  (see  Homilies). 

True,  our  view  is,  that  three  out  of  those  four  apostolic 
decisions  were  principally  suggested  by  Essenic  theories. 
But  there  are  apart  from  them  other  inferences  and 
accounts,  showing  forth  the  apostles'  religious  regard,  in 
general,  to  the  Mosaic  dietary  prohibitions.  We  will  pro- 
duce such  from  some  of  Paul's  Epistles,  and  from  Acts. 

In  Col.  ii.  16,  Paul  reprobates  the  temper  of  those  con- 
verts censuring  their  fellow- believers  for  not  observing  the 
laws  about  "meat  and  drink."  In  Rom  xiv.  2  sq.,  he  like- 
wise warns  those  "weak"  enough  in  not  indiscriminately 
eating,  out  of  religious  scruple,  every  sort  of  food,  against 
criticising  others  already  strong  enough  in  their  faith  in 
Jesus  not  to  have  to  pay  any  regard  to  such  distinction. 
Now  that  Paul  polemically  alluded  in  those  passages  to  the 
Ebionites,  as  is  the  opinion  of  many  modern  writers,  we 
may  readily  allow.  We  may  agree  with  them  that  in  his 
reflection  on  the  question  of  lawful  food  in  Romans,  he 
alluded  to  the  Ebionite  rejection  of  flesh-meat.  Even  in 
his  using,  in..  V.  14,  the  epithet  "unclean,"  he  may  have 
thought  of  such  Ebionite  notion.  Likewise  may  the  before- 
noted  passage  of  Colossians  have  the  same  Ebionite  bear- 
ing.    For  the  repudiation  by  the  Ebionites  of  animal  food 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  21^ 

is  variously  and  stronglj'  attested  ;  that  of  wine,  too,  would 
appear  from  the  testimony  of  Epiphanius  (  Haer.  xxv.  i6) 
who  reports,  that  they  celebrated  the  annual  sacrament  of 
the  Eucharist  by  using  water  only  (  instead  of  wine  ).  The 
ascetic  custom  of  combinedly  avoiding  flesh-meat  and 
fermented  liquors  they  had  in  common,  if  not  with  their 
Jewish  Essenic  stock, — for  whether  such  rules  subsisted 
with  the  Essenes  is  matter  of  dispute  among  various  learned 
authors  of  the  present  day, — at  least  with  the  Buddhists 
(  according  to  Koeppen,  '  The  Life  of  Buddha,'  in  Bunsen^ 
'The  Angtrl  Messiah').  Yet  apart  from  the  consideration 
that  there  is  no  conclusive  intrinsic  evidence  that  Ebionite 
allusion  is  to  be  traced  in  those  passages,  for  we  hold  it 
quite  as  possible  that  Paul  thought,  in  those  Epistles,  of 
meats  and  drinks  offered  to  idols,  and  meant  to  pass  on  the 
non-sectarian,  generally  Jewish  notion,  that  they  pollute 
the  eater  (meats  and  drinks  offered  to  idols  were  Rabbin- 
ically  reckoned  equal  to  "  sacrifices  of  the  dead,"  and  not 
only  interdicted  for  eating,  but  for  any  use  whatever  ;  see 
B.  Abodah  Zarah  f.  30  ;  they  were  also  considered  pollut- 
ing the  human  body,  some  Rabbis  declaring  their  impurity 
of  the  same  degree  with  that  of  a  corpse  ;  see  ib.  f.  32  and 
Cholin,  f.  129),  and  this  in  view  of  his  standpoint  of  indif- 
ference concerning  idol-meat  vented  in  i  Cor.  viii., — we 
have,  even  if  that  sectarian  Ebionite  allusion  be  allowed,  at 
all  events  to  insist  that  it  cannot  have  been  exclusive  in 
those  entire  passages.  This  becomes  plain  from  the  cir- 
cumstance that  Paul  reflects  in  one  same  strain  in  the 
Colossian  Epistle  on  the  observance  of  "  feast,  new  moon 
and  Sabbath,"  and  likewise  in  Romans  on  the  regard  for 
"  days."  Surely  no  one  will  be  stolid  enough  to  give  out 
those  sacred  and  solemn  days  as  peculiar  to  the  Ebionite 
sect.  Nor  can  it  for  one  moment  be  supposed  that  it  was 
solely  Ebionite  propagandists  who  taught  Christian  neo- 
phites  to  observe  them.  No,  indeed.  Any  Jewish  Chris- 
tian teacher,  with  the  exception  of  the  Paulinists,  will  have 
made  it  his  aim  to  propagate  their  observance  among  new 
converts.  The  bearing  in  these  passages  of  Paul's  Epistles 
as  to  sacred  days  can  accordingly  be  no  other  than  a  gen- 


2l6                              THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  ; 

erally  Judaic  one.     From  this  it  clearly  results  that,  even  if  i 

Paul's  remarks  on   religious  eating  restraints  were  person-  ^ 

ally  aimed  at  certain  Christian  zealots  who  chanced  to  be  j 

Rbionite  sectarians,  he  nevertheless  had,  in   putting  them  | 

down  together  with  those  on  the  sacred  days,  before  his  ; 

mind  at  large  the  national  Jewish  scruple  about  all  those  j 

ordinances  of  the  Mosaic-Jewish  religious  ritual.     It  vexed  ' 

him,  as   we   must  judge   from    his   relative   objections,  that  j 

they    were    persistently    being    transplanted    into    Gentile  : 

Christianity    by   Jewish    Christian    emissaries,    who    came  i 
from  the  seat  of  the  apostolic  church.     His  opposition  was, 

we  conclude,  by  far  not  so  much  to  Ebionite  sectarians  as,  | 
on  the  whole,  to  the  Judaizing  propaganda  carried  on  by 

the  determination  of  that  church.     In  the  latter,  then,  we  \ 

infer  for  our  purpose  from  Paul's  polemics,  the  Mosaic  eat-  { 

ing  laws  must  have  been  treated  with  religious  regard,  or  \ 

its    emissaries  could   not  have  urged  their  observance    on  | 

Ge)itile  converts,  or  on  converts  at  all.  i 

We  will  yet  adduce  some  other  indications  of  such  religi-  j 

Dus  regard  having  subsisted  in   the  apostolic  church.     Let  I 

us   first   notice   Peter's  alleged    dispensation    from   Mosaic  I 

food   injunctions    by   a   voice   from    Heaven    (Acts   x.  13).  ! 

We  may  without  hesitation  reduce  it  to  the  significance  of  i 

self-dispensation,  accompanied   perhaps, — if  there  is  at   all  j 

any    historical   ground    to    that    entire    story,    even    when  | 

stripped   of  the   vision   related   there, — by   the   delusion  of  ; 

himself,  before  he  set  out  on  the  missionary  journey  to  the  i 

preponderantly  pagan  city,  Caesarea,  that  the  divine  spirit  j 

privileged   him    to   indiscriminately   partake  of  the   meats  j 

prepared     by    pagans.      For    our     immediate     purpose    we  j 

assert,  that  that  account  shows  incontrovertibly,  that  Peter  \ 
was  at  least   until   then  observant   of  the  relative   Mosaic 

prohibitions.     Farther,  it  is  to  be  deduced  from  that  very  | 

author,  that  at  the  same  conjuncture  all  of  the  apostles  and  j 

their  church  held   to  them   religiously:  for  they  are  said  to  j 

have  taken  Peter  to  task  for  his  trespass  (ib.  xi.  1,3).  | 

Allthis  holds  good   on   the  supposition   that   Peter  had  ^ 

indeed  violated  Mosaic  eating  prohibitions  on  the  occasion  , 

of  his  visit  to  Cornelius,  or  on  any  other.      But  there  are,  in  i 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  21/ 

fact,  serious  doubts  about  the  respective  reports  that  he 
did  so.  Acts  is  not  in  the  least  authentic.  Its  tendency 
is  to  make  of  Peter  a  Pauline  universalist  and  partial 
repudiator  of  Mosaism  (see  especially  ib.  xv.  9),  and  of 
Paul  a  true  or  at  least  a  fair  respecter  and  observer  of  it. 
Its  author  has  possibly  taken  the  motive  for  that  fantastic 
account  rendered  in  ch.x.,from  the  noted  passage  of  Paul's 
Epistle  Gal.  ii.,  improving  it  for  his  object  in  the  way  he 
did.  As  to  Paul's  own  statement  in  the  Epistle,  while  we 
are  far  from  calling  in  question  the  substantial  occurrence 
as  brought  out  by  him,  we  would  yet  propose  that  there  is 
no  necessity  whatever  for  construing  it  into  bearing  any 
other  sense  than  merely  that  he  saw  Peter  eat  in  the  com- 
pany of  Gentiles.  What  he  ate  must  for  this  reason  not 
have  been  Mosaically  prohibited  food.  That  Paul  charged 
him  with  it,  does  not  signify  that  his  reproach  rested  on 
fact.  He  may  have  simply  judged  on  the  impression  which 
the  superficial  notice  of  his  eating  in  the  society  of 
Gentiles  made  on  him.  But  by  so  eating  and  yet  at  the 
same  time  abstaining  from  impure  meats,  his  trespass  was 
merely  against  the  Essenic-Ebionite  canon  (see  Clem. 
Hom.  xiii.  4),  or  the  Phariseic-Rabbinical  rule,  but  not 
against  a  Mosaic  inhibition.  Putting  the  case  even  that 
Peter  did  at  Antioch  actually  take  some  illicit  freedom 
with  regard  to  certain  Mosaic  eating  prohibitions,  we  have 
at  all  events  Paul's  own  testimony  that  at  that  point  of 
time  the  observance  of  them  was  the  indispensable  norm 
within  the  body  of  the  Christian  church.  For  he  presents 
Peter  and  others  as  having  "drawn  back"  from  the  Gen- 
tiles, that  is,  from  their  tables,  after  the  arrival  of  the 
Jerusalemite  deputation  sent  by  the  head  of  the  church, 
James,  through  fear  of  being  detected  by  them  eating 
unlawfully. 

It  is  readily  seen  from  all  the  foregoing  that  in  general, 
a  religious  regard  to  the  Mosaic  food  laws,  amalgamated 
with  the  respective  Essenic  precepts,  was  a  fixed  norm 
with  the  primitive  apostles.  They  adhered  to  them  to 
such  a  degree,  that  they  would  not  only  hold  themselves 


2r8  THE    SABBATIi    IN    HISTORY. 

liable  to  them,  but,  as  we  believe,  impressed  the  same 
liability  on  all  those  converts  to  Christianity  aspiring  to  a 
full  communion  with  them.  Nevertheless,  we  can  perceive 
the  possibility  that  the  missionary  intercourse  of  some 
apostles  and  sundry  agents  of  theirs,  had  gradually  brought 
about  a  certain  relaxation  as  to  some  of  those  laws,  to  which 
they,  ascribing  no  Divine  authority  to  any  of  them  at  all, 
would  attach  only  an  inferior  importance.  They  may  in 
mixing  with  pagans  for  objects  of  conversion  have  soon 
ascertained  that  it  was  impossible  to  be  any  longer  so 
observant  as  they  could  be  and  were  among  themselves,  in 
their  secluded,  uncolliding  Palestinian  homes.  In  the  first 
place  may  hunger  have  often  urged  them  to  relax  this  or 
that  ritualistic  food  restriction  (comp.  Acts  x.  lo).  Again, 
it  must  have  seriously  thwarted  the  end  they  pursued; 
which  was,  to  win  converts  from  among  the  pagans,  had 
they  persistently  refused  to  join  in  any  of  their  meals,  or 
been  critically  particular  as  to  every  dish  served  on  the 
tables  at  which  they  attended.  Such  a  demeanor  would 
have  had  a  decidedly  repulsive  effect  on  would-be  converts. 
It  is  therefore  plausible  that  they  will  have  indulged  some 
latitude  about  the  observance  of  the  food  laws,  when  con- 
versing with  Gentiles  on  Christian  missions.  Moreover,  it 
is  quite  probable  and  at  the  same  time  agreeable  with  our 
general  view  of  the  Jewish  Christians,  from  Jesus  onward, 
to  presume,  that  the  apostles  or  any  Jewish-descended  pro- 
fessors of  the  new  faith  were  at  no  time,  even  previous  to 
their  Gentile  mission  work,  very  scrupulous  about  the 
Mosaic-Jewish  food  laws,  at  least  those  which  did  not  rank 
with  them  as  of  unquestionable  religious  value.  Was  it  at 
all  to  be  expected  that  they  were  so  scrupulous,  when  we 
have  to  judge  of  them  as  depreciating  the  authority  of  the 
entire  Mosaic  ritual  from  the  common  Jewish  orthodox 
acceptation  of  directly  Divine,  to  angelic  or  merely  human.'* 
And,  let  us  amplify  the  question,  was,  in  view  of  this  fact, 
a  scrupulosity  about  any  ceremonial  rites,  even  those  which 
the)^   on    the   whole,   yet    prized    religiously^    to    be   at   all 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  219 

expected  from  them  r  That  they  did  so  depreciate  the 
authority  of  the  Law,  we  not  only  assert  on  the  general 
supposition  of  disciples  ordinarily  following  their  master, 
but  there  is  valid  Rabbinical  and  other  testimony  for  it. 

From  the  passage  in  the  Talmud  quoted  above  p  149, 
and  which  is  indisputably  historic,  it  appears  that  the 
Mineans  recognized  only  the  Ten  Commandments  as 
Divine  or  angelic.  We  affix  the  latter  clause,  because  that 
Talmudical  relation  is  not  explicit  enough,  allowing  the 
interpretation  that  the  Mineans  regarded  them,  and  them 
only,  as  directly  promulgated  by  God,  as  well  as  the  other, 
that  even  the  Decalogue  was  enunciated  by  angels,  and 
not  by  the  Deity  himself;  see  our  Excursus  B.  The  latter 
apprehension  would  be  more  adequate  as  concerns  the 
Jewish  Christians  who,  as  was  also  illustrated  above,  limi- 
ted the  Decalogue,  while  nominally  reverencing  it  as  such, 
practically  to  a  Hexalogue.  It  is  not  reasonable  to  sup- 
pose that  this  reduction  to  the  range  of  Six  Comrrland- 
ments  would  have  been  attempted  by  any,  who  attributed 
an  immediate  Divine  authority  to  the  entire  Decalogue. 

Now  as  to  those  Mineans  there  is  in  our  view,  indeed,  no 
•direct  evidence  that  Jewish  Christians  were  solely  meant 
by  this  title  in  that  context.  Essenes  and  other  like 
heretics,  particularly  Gnostics  of  Jewish  descent,  might,  too, 
have  been  included.  Even  men  of  the  type  of  Philo — the 
spiritual  father  of  Gnosticism — who,  while  they  were  out- 
wardly observant  Jews  and  also  sincere  in  their  religious 
practice,  had  yet  fallen  away  from  the  orthodox  conception 
of  all  the  Mosaic  laws  being  immediately  commanded  by 
God,  as  well  as  from  the  pure  and  stern  monotheistic  doc- 
trine of  God  alone,  without  any  intermediate  spiritual 
powers,  having  providentially  acted  and  enacted  laws,  as 
represented  in  the  plain  words  of  the  Pentateuch,  would 
by  the  ancient  Rabbis  have  promptly  been  denounced  as 
Mineans;  see  Excursus  B.  Yet  for  all  that  we  are  justified 
in  prominently,  if  not  primarily,  detecting  in  that  term  and 
its  connection  in  the  aforementioned  Talmudical   passage, 


220  THE    SAB  3  ATI  I    IN    HISTORY. 

Jewish  Christians.  For  of  them,  and  the  Gentile  Christians 
following  them,  we  know  also  from  other  sources  that  they 
held,  and  dogmatically  and  unhesitatingly  pronounced,  the 
nominal  Decalogue  as  the  Law  proper. 

To  continue  our  above  argument  we  have  further  to  urge, 
that  scrupulosity  as  to  that  or  any  other  part  of  the  Mosaic 
ritual  Law  was  not  to  be  expected  from  Jesus'  disciples  for 
this  other  reason,  that  their  enthusiasm  for  the  Kingdom 
endured  unabated  after  his  death,  occupying  their  minds,  as 
we  presume,  to  such  a  degree  that  only  a  moderate  atten- 
tion, and  one  insignificant  in  proportion  to  that  principal 
Christian  cause,  could  be  spared  for  ritualistic  duties.  Be- 
sides, all  the  other  Messianic-prophetical  notions  which  we 
produced  above  as  presumably  prevailing  on  Jesus  to  treat 
ceremonial  observances  with  indifference,  are  likewise  fairly 
supposed  as  having  passed  to  his  disciples.  All  these  ele- 
ments may  have  concurrently  met  in  the  minds  of  the  dis- 
ciples, and  brought  forth  a  certain  ceremonial  laxity,  the 
same  we  discerned  in  their  habits  in  the  lifetime  of  their 
Master.  With  this  consisted  well  their  avowed  adherence 
to,  and  even  ordinary  practice  of,  those  portions  of  the 
Mosaic  ritual  named  above,  and,  perhaps,  to  some  more 
ceremonies  to  which  their  minds  were  religiously  partial. 
But,  we  are  to  maintain,  they  valued,  for  the  most  part  at 
least,  only  their  essence,  and  were  not  much  concerned  with 
the  way  of  their  observance,  established  of  old  and  by  aid 
of  tradition.  Farther,  they  practiced  them,  or  most  of  them, 
not  with  the  common  Jewish-religious  sentiment  at  heart, 
but  with  an  intent  of  their  own  ;  not  because  they  felt 
themselves  bound  in  their  conscience  to  thereby  discharge 
religious  duties  owed  to  God  who  had  himself  enjoined 
them,  but  from  a  capricious  motive  of  choice  and  prefer- 
ence, how  pure  and  reverent  soever  it  might  generally  have 
been.  Religious  arbitrariness,  however,  never  fails  of  cre- 
ating sooner  or  later  an  inconstancy,  prone  to  turn  into 
careless  relaxation,  when  the  problem  of  expediency  inter- 
venes, of  whatever  nature  thi",  may  be.  In  the  case  of  the 
disciples  the  expediency,  we  are  ready  to  admit,  bore,  for  a 
large  part,  a  kind  of  spiritual  or  ideal  mark.     But  it  doubtless 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  221 

interfered  all  the  same  with  the  regular  and  prompt  exercise 
of  their  Jewish  religious  duties.  At  all  events  it  is  clear 
that  all  those  combined  moments  of  dogmatic  dissent 
which  we  brought  forward  before  as  having  operated  on 
their  minds,  must,  if  they  continued  to  exist  with  them 
after  Jesus'  death,  have  considerably,  nay  essential]}-,  de  ■ 
tracted  from  their  practical,  serious  attention  even  to  the 
limited  Jewish  ritual  which  they  had  yet  upheld. 

Those,  therefore,  who  with  the  Author  of  '  Supernatural 
Religion'  pronounce  the  apostles  after  the  departure  of 
Jesus  as  observant  Jews  with  the  distinction  onl}'  of  their 
being  Jesus-believers,  are  widely  astray.  That  Author 
advances:  "At  the  death  of  Jesus  the  Twelve  remained 
closely  united  to  Judaism ...  .They  were  simply  Jews 
believing  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah.  .  .  ,  and  if  the  influ- 
ence of  Paul  enlarged  their  views  upon  Fome  minor  points, 
we  have  no  reason  to  believe  that  they  ever  abandoned 
their  belief  in  the  continued  obligation  of  the  Law.  Paul 
never  succeeded  in  bringing  his  elder  colleagues  over  to 
his  views."  Now,  let  us  say,  he  is  surely  correct  in  the 
latter  assertion,  also  partially  in  the  other,  tiiat  they 
"remained  closely  united  to  Judaism."  For,  in  ver}-  deed, 
they  never  renounced  allegiance  to  Judaism.  They  never, 
for  all  we  can  gather  from  the  extant  sources,  openly  spoke 
with  disdain,  or  pretended  to  the  abrogation,  future  or 
present,  of  the  Mosaic  economy,  as  Stephen  and  Paul 
respectively  did.  But  that  their  union  to  Judaism  was  a  close 
one,  we  have  decidedly  to  negative.  Their  ceremonial 
religious  conduct  was  at  no  time  since  their  attachment  to 
Jesus  conformable  to  the  established  Judaism,  nor  was  their 
faith  the  untarnished  monotheistic  one  of  the  body  of  the 
Jewish  people.  Surely,  they  were  not  considered  by  the 
true  Jews  as  merely  harmlessly  dissenting  from  them  on 
the  problem  of  Messiah.  They  were,  on  the  contrary, 
classified  by  the  Rabbis  as  IMineans — an  opprobrious  desig- 
nation generic  for  heretics,  and    this  almost  uniformly  irk 


(7) 


222  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

view  of  their  known  or  strongly  suspected  ditheistic  or 
polytheistic  beliefs.  With  that  title  the  professors  of 
Christian  doctrines  were  already  branded,  as  we  propose 
in  our  work  on  the  Mineans,  at  a  rather  early  date. 

The  Rabbinical  doctors  legislated  against  the  intercourse 
with  them  under  that  title,  as  well  as  they  had  them  doubt- 
less included — whether  prominently  or  only  equally  with 
other  heretics,  cannot  be  determined — in  the  formula  of 
irtiprecation  issued  about  the  earlier  part  of  the  second  cen- 
tury, C.  E.  The  cause  of  this  was,  we  hold,  mainly  the 
various  proclamations  by  the  Jewish  Christian  sectaries  of 
the  divine  qualities  of  Jesus. 

Were  the  Twelve,  then,  "simply  Jews,"  with  the  only 
divergent  mark  of  the  belief  in  Jesus  as  the  Messiah  ?  By 
no  means.  They  were  schismatics,  with  aims  and  tenden- 
cies subversive  of  the  pure  Jewish  Monotheism,  and  at  the 
same  time  with  a  religious  practice,  resistant  to  a  large 
portion  of  the  Mosaic  ritual,  inasmuch  as  they  unquestion- 
ably opposed  sacrifice  and  all  the  appertaining  or  con- 
nected observances,  and  lax  in  many  other  ceremonial 
rites,  but  the  initiatory  one  and  probably,  besides,  the  pre- 
cepts of  religious  purity  with  the  inclusion  of  food  restric- 
tions which,  mixed  up  with  Essenic  or  Ebionite  theories  as 
they  presumably  were,  they  were  most  apt  to  heed,  in  the 
ordinary  course  of  their  communal  life,  with  the  minute- 
ness peculiar  to  those  sects. 

Baur,  '  Paul,'  i.  p.  204,  maintains,  too,  that  the  Jewish 
'Christian  community — his  observations  are  on  the  period 
vas  late  as  the  trials  of  Paul  under  the  procurators  Felix 
and  Festus — were  not  greatly  differing  from  the  rest  of  the 
Jews,  and  merely  distinguished  from  them  by  their  own 
Messiah-belief.  Now  if  after  all  that  has  been  set  forth  in 
this  and  previous  chapters,  a  claim  of  Jewish  orthodoxy  is 
yet  to  be  put  up  for  the  disciples  of  Jesus,  we  have  to 
insist  that  the  religious  test  by  which  they  must  be  tried  to 
be  found  thus  qualified,  can  assuredly  be  no  other  than  that 
of  an  extra-Jewish  critic,  trained  in  the  Pauline  faitlvsys- 
tem.      But  as   far  as  we  are  able  to  judge  of  the  true  Jews 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  223 

who  were  their  contemporaries,  we  are  most  safe  in  assert- 
ing that  from  their  pious  standpoint  those  Christians  were 
not  ranked  along  with  themselves  as  orthodox,  but  stigma- 
tized with  the  title  of  heretics. 

On  what  grounds  should  the  apostles  have  been  held  or- 
thodox Jews  ?  Had,  perhaps,  their  appearance  in  the  Tem- 
ple, that  is,  on  Solomon's  porch  (Acts  v.  12;  comp.  ib.  ii. 
46),  v/hich  porch  was  situated  on  the  east  of  the  outermost 
court  (see  Keim,  1.  c,  and  Ewald,  Hist,  of  Israel,  vi.  360), 
indicated  such  orthodoxy.''  Zeller,  in  his  'The  Contents 
and  the  Origin  of  Acts,'  observes  concerning  the  various 
assertions  in  Acts  of  the  apostles'  attendance  in  the  pre- 
cincts of  the  Temple,  that  "we  have  the  more  reason  for 
giving  credence  to  them,  as  the  Acts  declares  the  primi- 
tive apostles  and  their  church  as  rigidly  adhering  to  the 
Mosaic  Law  ;  xv.  and  xxi.  20  sq."  But,  we  have  mainly  to 
object,  the  testimony  of  a  writer  whose  whole  composition 
is,  as  is  practically  done  by  Zeller,  pronounced  a  sheer  ten- 
dency-work, can  be  of  very  little  historical  merit.  If  he 
invented  from  his  own  mind  in  so  many  instances,  he  must 
consequently  be  expected  to  have  done  so  yet  in  a  few 
more.  Again,  we  have  to  ask,  what  of  it,  if  they  really 
appeared  habitually  on  that  porch,  at  times  even  at  the  hour 
of  prayer  ?  First,  we  affirm,  their  meeting  was,  judging 
from  the  context  of  the  relative  reports  of  Acts,  primarily 
or  solely  for  performing  their  miracles  and  for  "  teaching  and 
preaching  Jesus  Christ  "  (see  ib.  v.  42),  and  not  for  devo- 
tions. Secondly,  the  apostolic  hours  of  prayer,  or  stations, 
as  they  were  afterwards  called,  were,  from  relative  indica- 
tions (see  ib.  x.  9,  iii.  i  ;  also  TertuUian,  'On  Fasting'), 
entirely  different  from  the  Jewish  hours  of  devotion.  That 
their  prayers  were,  thirdly,  not  those  of  the  established 
Jewish  ritual,  has  already  been  said  above.  Fourthly,  let 
us  ask,  could  the  apostles'  appearance  on  that  porch,  even 
if  it  had  been  purposely  for  devotional  exercises,  have 
impressed  the  orthodox  Jewish  observers  as  an  evidence 
that  they  were  Law-abiding,  when  they  otherwise  knew 
them  as  so  averse  to  the  national  Temple  service  ? 


224  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

Let  it  again  be  stated  in  this  place, — we  have  set  it  forth 
at  length  in  another  published  essay  of  ours. — that  a  fair 
measure  of  reverence  for  the  Temple  as  the  fixed  national 
Jevvisii  centre  of  Divine  service,  consisted  in  the  minds  of 
the  Essenes  and  the  Ebionites  (see  on  the  latter,  Clem. 
Horn.  ii.  17,  22),  as  well  as  of  Jesus  and  all  the  Jewish 
Christians,  with  an  utter  disdain  for  the  sacrificial  service 
actually  conducted  in  it.  We  maintain  in  that  disquisition, 
that  the  antinomian  and  antinational  tendencies  must  be 
held  apart  from  each  other  in  our  judgment  as  well  on 
Jesus  as  on  all  the  Jewish  Christians.  From  this  point  of 
view,  we  urge,  the  anti-Temple  utterances  of  Jesus  have  to 
be  considered.  The  same  distinction  of  the  sentiment  on 
Israel's  national  sanctuary  as  such,  from  that  concerning 
the  established  ritual  carried  on  therein,  is  to  be  upheld 
for  his  disciples,  to  whom,  doubtless,  the  Master's  view  on 
the  Jewish  Divine  service  passed  as  an  unalterable  dogma. 
Only  Stephen  and  Paul  and  such  like  philosophizing 
Hellenists  who  were  opposed  to  every  hand-made  temple, 
could  not  well  have  cherished  any  reverence  for  Israel's 
Temple  in  Jerusalem,  even  only  in  the  abstract,  that  is, 
disjoined  in  thought  from  its  sacrificial  worship. 

We  have,  then,  to  reject  the  argument  from  the  apostles' 
appearance  in  the  Temple,  put  forth  in  favor  of  their  Jew- 
ish orthodoxy,  as  unavailing.  We  aver  that  such  appear- 
ance could,  in  any  case,  not  have  the  virtue  of  redeeming 
them,  in  the  sight  of  true  Jews,  from  the  odium  of  heterodox 
innovation  and  pernicious  doctrinal  heresy,  which  they  had 
otherwise  drawn  on  themselves. 

More  in  harmony  with  our  view  which  we  have  evolved 
with  authentic  statements  and  indications,  as  well  as  by 
way  of  inference,  is  the  following  sentiment  of  Keim  (1.  c. 
iii.  p.  328):  "The  first  apostles  were  not  absolutely  faith- 
ful to  the  Law;  compare  only  Peter,  in  Gal.  ii.  12,  and  also 
the  transgressors  of  the  Law,  even  James,  in  Josephus,  Ant. 
XX.  9,  I."  He  allows  this  in  the  face  of  his  previous 
remark,  that  the  apostles  "  did  not  see  that  Jesus  had  in 
his  innermost  genius  overstepped  the  limits  of  Judaism." 
On   this   latter    assertion    we   have   already    passed   above. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  225 

We  insisted  there,  that  their  comprehension  in  respect  of 
the  emancipation  from  the  burden  of  ceremonial  obser- 
vances was  by  no  means  less  capable  than  that  of  Paul  and 
John,  whom  he  credits  with  "fully  developing  the  spirit  of 
the  teaciiing  of  Jesus."  As  to  the  same  author's  before- 
cited  references  to  Epistle  Gal.  and  the  Antiquities  of 
Josephus,  to  prove  that  the  apostles  were  wanting  in  abso- 
lute faithfulness  to  the  Law,  we  have,  too,  to  direct  the 
reader's  attention  to  the  opinion  we  advanced  on  them  in 
the  respective  places  of  the  present  treatise.  He  could 
certainly  have  added  many  more  direct  or  inferential  indi- 
cations that  the  apostles  were,  on  the  whole,  lax  in  the 
practice  of  even  those  Mosaic-Jewish  ceremonial  rites 
which  they,  in  substance,  professed  as  valid  for  themselves 
as  born  Jews,  and  kept  embodied  in  their  new,  Christian, 
usage. 

Let  us  here,  as  we  are  to  produce  the  sum-total  of  the 
estimation  and  practice  of  Jewish  ceremonial  rites  by 
Jesus'  disciples  after  his  death,  pause  awhile  and  meditate 
on  the  possibility,  that  our  conclusions  brought  out  by 
critical  methods  have  been  drawn  too  sternly.  We  are 
conscientiously  aware  that  we  owe  justice  to  persons  of 
antiquity  no  less  than  to  our  own  coevals.  Nay  we  hold 
that  they,  being  removed  from  the  scene  on  which  they 
might  vindicate  themselves  from  our  perhaps  one-sided 
and  strained  criticism,  deserve  even  a  larger  measure  of 
considerate  judgment  than  those  who,  because  living,  have 
ample  opportunity  of  righting  themselves  before  our  critical 
tribunal. 

That  the  aphorism,  "  like  master  like  pupil,"  is  on 
general  grounds  applicable  also  to  Jesus'  disciples,  is  not  to 
be  questioned.  Nay  it  would  seem  that  it  holds  of  them 
all  the  more  appropriately,  as  we  know  that  the  later 
Ebionites  made  use  of  Jesus'  own  respective  saying, — 
though  in  a  different  sense  from  the  one  in  which  he  had 
propounded  it, — "  It  is  enough  for  the  disciple  that  he  be 
as  his  master"  (Matt.  x.  25  ;  see  Epiphanius,  Haer.  xxx.  26, 
and  our  Part  First,  p.  123).  This  was  the  mode  of  reason- 
ing with  the  Ebionites  to  defend  their  strict  adherence  to 


226  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

the  rite  of  circumcision  against  those  Christians  who 
opposed  it.  Let  us  say  that  it  is  but  fair  to  infer  that  they 
resorted  no  less  to  the  same  apologetical  argument  with 
regard  to  their  fulfilling  other  Mosaic  religious  precepts 
according  to  the  Master's  custom.  While  we  are  only 
informed  of  that  sort  of  argumentation  being  employed  by 
the  Ebionite  sect,  it  may  be  assumed  confidently  that  not 
only  they,  but  all  the  Palestinian  Jewish  Christiahs,  strove 
to  follow,  in  their  outward  religious  practice,  in  the  wake 
of  Jesus.  Accordingly  we  would  have  to  maintain  that 
they  followed  him  not  only  afifirmatively,  but  also  nega- 
tively, that  is,  as  to  the  discriminations  he  made  between 
what  he  held  obligatory  and  what  seemed  to  him  indiffer- 
ent or  objectionable;  and  also,  that  they  fully  embraced  and 
put  into  practice  all  Jesus'  theories  on  the  ceremonial  law, 
those  independent  of  Messianic  notions  as  well  as  those 
relating  to  them. 

Yet  all  this  is  only  an  anticipation,  however  strongly  and 
solidly  it  rests  on  relative  indications  or  inferences,  as  also 
on  the  directly  provable  analogous  fact,  that  Jesus'  super- 
natural claims  too  were  amply  adopted  by  the  disciples. 
For  if  it  is  indisputable  that  they  made  his  teaching  about 
himself  their  own,  is  it  not  most  likely,  too,  that  they 
espoused  also  his  various  position  on  Jewish  religious  rites, 
as  we  have  illustrated  it  in  previous  chapters  .-*  And  is  it 
not  in  especial  likely  that,  as  regards  his  Messianic  dispen- 
satory pretension,  its  effect  continued  with  them  fresh  and 
vigorous,  in  proportion  to  the  undiminished  glowing  Mes- 
sianic enthusiasm  that  filled  their  souls  even  after  his 
death  ? — a  circumstance  that  was  also  brought  forth  above. 

All  this  granted,  it  is  none  the  less  well  and  fair  to  view, 
in  this  our  inquiry  into  the  outward  ceremonial  religious 
attitude  of  the  disciples  after  Jesus'  death,  the  availability, 
in  their  favor,  of  another  aphorism  :  "Circumstances  alter 
cases."  Let  us  see  whether,  in  the  totally  changed  con- 
dition in  which  they  were  placed  after  his  departure,  there 
may  not  have  been  created  motives  for  a  more  observant 
course — the  ineradicable,  constitutional  Christian  opposi- 
tion to  sacrifice  and   its  connected  rites  always  excepted. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  22/ 

Before  we  essay  to  investigate  this  problem,  let  us  again 
remember  that  the  teaching  time  of  Jesus  was  but  one  or 
at  the  most  two  years,  viz.,  between  33-35  C.  E.  (so  KeimJ. 
It  might  accordingly  be  going  too  far  to  expect  from  that 
short  space  of  time  of  the  disciples'  connection  with  him, 
a  real  elaborate  and  extensive  system  of  practical  religion 
that  could  suffice  them  in  all  later  conditions  and  com- 
plexities of  life.  Not  even  for  a  thorough  tuition  in  all  the 
details  of  the  Messianic  religion,  such  as  we  ascribed  to 
him  above,  might  that  limited  period  have  been  adequate. 
And  this  in  particular,  when  we  farther  consider,  that  he 
had  from  the  start  of  his  public  career  met  with  or  involved 
himself  in  frequent  polemical  struggles  that  grew  more 
vehement  as  time  went  on  :  so  that  a  successful  leisure, 
even  only  for  the  private  instructions  to  be  imparted  to  his 
disciples,  cannot  be  maintained  for  any  time  of  his  public 
labor.  Moreover,  a  feeling  of  perturbance  about  his  own 
fate,  too,  must,  since  the  imprisonment  of  his  cognate 
southern  preacher  of  the  Kingdom,  John  the  Baptist,  have 
been  pungently  preying  on  his  mind.  With  this  perturb- 
ance, while  it  did  not  prevent  him  from  continuing 
resolutely  and  even  at  all  hazards,  his  Messianic  activity, 
could  yet  not  consist  that  intellectual  composure  in  which 
alone  a  teacher  may  advantageously  mould  his  manifold 
ideas  into  a  compact,  well  rounded  system.  The  excited 
days  he  passed  through  were,  then,  little  favorable  for 
explicit .  elucidations  on  problems  of  religious  practice. 
To  be  sure,  it  could,  on  the  other  hand,  not  take  the  dis- 
ciples long  to  learn  from  him  the  general  lesson  of  the 
relative  unimportance  of  outward  Jewish  religious  rites,  in 
the  transitional  state  in  which  he  represented  the  world  to 
be  in  his  time.  This  lesson  they  could  quickly  and  readily 
succeed  in  comprehending.  Yet  we  believe  at  the  same 
time,  that  not  only  were  his  particular  utterances  on  this 
or  that  law  or  custom,  put  forth  on  sundry  occasions,  for 
the  most  part  only  fragmentary  and  desultory,  but  they 
could  naturally  not  be  sufficient  for  every  future  state  and 
phase  of  life  that  lay  in  his  time  in  obscurity,  and  could  not 
possibly  be  forecast.     When  they  were  therefore,  after  his 


228  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

departure,  left  to  themselves  and  without  the  teacher  to 
whom  they  might  turn  for  instrujtion  in  all  questions  of 
conscience,  they  must  many  a  time  have  been  perplexed 
as  to  the  proper  decision  to  be  made  on  points  of  religious 
practice.  On  these  the  Master's  reflections  were  only  occa- 
sional. Their  memory  could  therefore  have  retained  only 
a  p.umber  of  stray  utterances  that  lacked  systematic 
arrangement  anJ  completeness.  It  results  that,  when  in 
their  altered  condition  new  questions  of  such  a  character 
turned  up  on  which  the  Master  had  not  expressly  given  his 
opinion,  they  were  compelled  to  strain  their  memory  for  an 
analogy  that  would  approximately  cover  the  new  case, 
whatever  it  might  be,  and  assist  them  in  being  as  conform- 
able as  possible  to  his  view  and  wish.  At  times,  however, 
even  the  utmost  taxing  of  their  memory  will  not  have 
availed  them  to  recall  an  analogy  that  would  aid  them  in 
finding  an  authentic  thread,  by  seizing  and  following  which 
they  would  be  able  to  realize  an  identity  with  his  spirit. 
In  such  instances,  then,  in  which  either  no  direct  reference 
to  the  Master's  own  precepts  could  be  made,  or  no  analogy 
from  his  lifetime  be  discovered  for  their  guidance,  they 
were  urged  to  take  up  with  the  verdict  of  their  own  mind. 
This  will,  it  is  fair  to  presume,  have  on  the  whole  been  a 
strenuously  aimed  accommodation  to  the  liberal,  ceremoni- 
ally unincumbered  Messianic  religion  of  Jesus;  butit^ay, 
on  the  other  s'de,  have  also  been  considerably  tempered 
by  the  pressure  of  unfavorable  circumstances,  by  which  we 
know  them  to  have  been  unremittingly  confronted. 

Such  circumstances  existed  all  along  since  Jesus'  death. 
His  tragic  fate  itself  must  have  struck  a  deep  terror  in  their 
breasts.  They  saw,  from  his  precipitous  end  as  well  as 
from  the  previous  fatal  doom  visited  on  the  Baptist,  how 
perilous  Messianic  movements  were  in  the  Jewish  land, 
from  south  to  north.  The  execution  of  Stephen  for  his 
resistant  and  defiant  denunciations  of  the  existing  Jewish 
worship  and  institutions,  as  well  as  the  persecution  of  other 
Hellenistic  Jewish  Christians  with  and  after  him,  must,  too, 
have  had  an  overawing  effect  on  their  minds.  They  them- 
selves were  from   the   Master's   departure   forth  continually 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  229 

subjected  to  close  surveillance  and  inquisition,  if  not  per- 
secution. They  became  more  and  more  singled  out  as 
heinous  suspects  for  assigning  divinity  to  Jesus,  which 
conflicted  so  irreconcilably  with  pure  Jewish  Monotheism. 
This  cloud  of  suspicion  overhung  them  thickly  and  was, 
indeed,  never  dispelled.  Furthermore,  severe  visitations 
befell  some  of  them  in  Agrippa  I.'s  reign.  It  may  therefore 
be  fairly  supposed  that  from  the  latter  epoch  forward,  they 
made  up  their  minds  to  a  more  cautious  and  wary  way, 
alike  in  their  Messianic  profession  and  mission,  and  in 
their  outward  religious  conduct.  Their  Messianic  avowal 
and  propaganda  may  from  thence  not  have  been  so  clam- 
orous, nor  their  Jewish  religious  practice  so  lax  any  more, 
as  before. 

This  supposition  holds,  if  not  of  the  bold  apostles  Peter 
and  John  (comp.  Acts  iv.  13)  and  of  James  the  Just,  who 
succeeded  the  ill-fated  apostle  James  in  the  presidency  of 
the  mother-church  and  fell  himself  a  victim  to  hierarchal 
violence,  at  least  of  the  majority  of  the  apostles  and  the 
generality  of  the  Palestinian  Jewish  Christians  in  the 
apostolic  age  (see  also  Strauss,  Life  of  Jesus,  i.  295,  who 
suggests  that  the  terrible  fate  of  Jesus  and  Stephen  pro- 
duced the  "effect  of  Jesus' followers  abandoning  the  dan- 
gerous position  which  he  had  occupied,  and  retreating 
several  steps,  etc."  He  advances  this  as  a  certain  conclu- 
sion. We  on  our  part  give  it,  however,  only  as  a  possibility. 
Nor  do  we  date  this  possible  retrogression  from  the  epoch 
named  by  him.  We  rather  propose  for  it  the  time  of 
Agrippa  I.'s  persecution).  This  view  will  surel}'  appear  yet 
more  acceptable,  when  we  bear  in  mind  that  those  votaries  of 
Jesus  must  have  realized  more  and  more  that  there  was  no 
trifling  with  the  overwhelming  power  standing  over  against 
their  little  band.  They  must  by  degrees  have  become 
aware  that,  if  they  wished  to  retain  the  seat  of  the  church 
in  Jerusalem,  they  must  cautiously  abstain  from  any  scan- 
dalizing of  the  Jewish  public,  either  by  defiant  breaches  of 
Jewish  ordinances,  or  by  an  ostentatious  deification  of  the 
Master.  The  formidable  arm  of  the  supreme  magistracy  of 
the  Jewish  nation  could,  as  they  must  have  felt  more  and 


230  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

more,  crush  and  annihilate  them  at  any  moment,  if  they 
newly  attempted  any  headlong  provocations  of  the  inner- 
most religious  sentiments  of  all  its  orthodox  people.  True, 
the  right  over  life  and  death  was  in  those  days  taken  from 
the  Synhedrin  and  reserved  to  the  Roman  procurators  (see 
Ant.  XX.  9,  I  ;  John  xviii.  31).  Yet  there  is  no  doubt  what- 
ever that  that  supreme  court  could  at  any  time  and  in  any 
case,  except  in  one  like  Paul's,  obtain  easily  the  procura- 
torial  sanction  for  a  sentence  of  death  against  a  Christian 
delinquent,  if  it  was  minded  to  pass  it  and  have  it  inflicted. 
To  presume  that  the  then  still  powerful  Jewish  Senate,  the 
prominent  doctors  of  the  Law,  and  their  many  influential 
disciples,  together  with  the  bulk  of  the  Jewish  lay  people, 
were  afraid  of  the  few  hundred  Christians,  is,  to  say  the 
least,  most  absurd.  Different  it  is  with  the  danger  the  rep- 
resentatives of  the  Jewish  nation  really  apprehended  from 
the  spread  of  the  new  doctrines  of  the  renegade  church. 
It  was  too  obvious  and  imminent  not  to  notice  and  be 
alarmed  at  it.  But  they  were,  we  contend,  alarmed  only 
insomuch,  as  their  purpose  was  to  do  no  bodily  harm  to  the 
adherents  of  Jesus.  Else  the  danger  could  have  been 
removed  by  a  few  decisive  strokes. 

As  far  as  the  Roman  rulers  and  people  at  large  were 
concerned,  they  would  surely  have  been  most  ready  to  lend 
their  strong  help  to  viojent  persecutions  of  the  Christians, 
if  the  Jewish  people  had  been  inclined  to  such  severe 
measures  in  the  period  after  Agrippa's  death.  For  it  is 
well  known  and  variously  verified  that  the  Romans  hated 
the  Christians  intensely,  and  that,  mainly,  for  their 
Messianic  doctrine  and  belief.  Their  name  alone  con- 
stantly suggested  to  them  a  mutinous  spirit  and  disposi- 
tion. For  Christian  meant  "  kingly,"  and  this  implied  ta 
them  the  tendency  to  rebel  from  the  all-powerful  empire  ; 
see  our  First  Part.  Note  20,  and  Tacitus,  Annals,  xv.  44, 
who,  in  speaking  of  the  Christians  as  "hated  for  their 
vices"  and  as  animated  by  the  "  hatred  of  mankind,"  seems 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORV.  23 1 

to  allude  chiefly  to  their  characteristic  name  and  their  doc- 
trines about  a  Messiah-king,  whom  they  not  only  believed 
to  have  come,  but  fervently  expected  to  come  again  ;  com- 
pare also  Ep.  Pet.  ii.  12,  iii.  16. 

It  is  questionless  that  the  Jewish  people  and  their  Senate 
had  autonomy  and  power  enough  left  to  them  to  the  last 
days  of  their  State,  to  plague  and  punish  the  Christian 
schismatics,  if  these  continued  to  excite  their  intolerance 
by  any  demonstrative  negation  of  and  assault  on  the 
Jewish  creed  and  ritual.  This  it  is  to  be  surmised  the 
Christian  believers  of  the  Palestinian  church  realized  more 
and  more.  It  is  therefore  not  amiss  to  suppose  that  they, 
after  the  time  of  Agrippa's  persecution,  gradually  left  off 
their  former  temerity  as  to  Jewish  religious  conduct  and 
became  more  observant  than  they  were  since  their  connec- 
tion with  Jesus. 

Possibly  this  at  first  insincere  policy  of  greater  caution, 
developed  by  degrees  into  a  fairly  conscientious  mode  of 
Jewish  observance.  While  the  change  was  not  spon- 
taneous, it  can  yet  be  conceived  that  the  persecutions  they 
underwent,  and  the  animosity  that  prevailed  against  them, 
struck  their  conscience  to  the  quick,  and  made  them  grad- 
ually bethink  themselves  better.  By  degrees  they  may 
have  subsided  into  more  sober  judgments  on  their  Jewish 
religious  obligations.  Their  veneration  for  the  Master,  it  is 
true,  did  not  diminish  aught  after  his  departure.  It 
assumed,  on  the  contrary,  more  and  more  deifying  dimen- 
sions. Their  Messianic  enthusiasm  lost,  neither,  any  of 
its  fever  height  after  his  personal  withdrawal,  but  continued 
to  be  very  strong  and  all-absorbing.  Yet  there  is  no  rea- 
son why  the  many  serious  obstacles  which  they  continually 
encountered  during  the  early  growth  of  the  church,  should 
not  eventually  have  turned  their  former  inconsiderateness 
as  to  all  things  lying  outside  the  Messianic  scheme,  which 
had  outrun  their  prudence  as  well  as  their  sense  of  obliga- 
tion as  born  Jews,  into  a  more  thoughtful  regard  for  their 
native  religion  and  its  ceremonial  precepts. 


232  THE    SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

Those  more  sober  jucgments  may,  moreover,  have 
gained  greater  substantiality  in  view  of  the  circumstance, 
that  the  Master's  living  word  and  actual  example  were  no 
more  with  them,  by  leaning  on  which  they  could  formerly, 
in  his  lifetime,  feel  themselves  compensated  in  their  con- 
science for  various  ceremonial  shortcomings.  "  The  "  bride- 
groom "  whose  presence  had  to  them  such  convincing  and 
reassuring  dispensatory  authority,  had  personally  gone 
from  among  them,  so  that  direct  dispensations  could  no 
more  be  got  from  him.  This  may  have  worked  a  thorough 
change  in  their  attitude  toward  the  Jewish  ceremonial  and, 
together  with  the  before-noted  other  adverse  causes  that 
operated  on  them,  urged  them  to  return  and  settle  down  to 
a  more  strict  observance  of  it,  the  same  in  which  they  had 
been  bred  up  in  their  parental  homes.  What  they  had 
valued  slightly  or  treated  with  levity  in  the  short  interval 
of  their  personal  alliance  with  Jesus  and  yet  some  time 
thereafter,  may  from  that  later  period  on  which  we  sug- 
gested before,  h^ve  again  been  regarded  by  them  with  a 
fair  sense  of  obligation.  What  they  had  abandoned  in 
their  early  immediate  Messianic  excitement,  they  may 
later  have  re-adopted  as  really  compatible  with  their  Mes- 
siah-belief, and  as  obligatory  on  themselves. 

All  this  we  advance,  however,  as  a  mere  hypothesis,  with 
the  purpose,  as  stated  above,  to  be  as  fair  as  possible  in  our 
judgment  on  the  early  Jewish  Christian  sect.  The  fact 
remains  nevertheless,  that  the  indications  to  the  contrary 
are  heavily  on  the  other  side  of  the  balance. 

As  regards  the  Sabbath,  while  there  can  be  no  question 
that  the  apostles  and  other  Jewish  Christians  of  their  age 
kept  it,  in  the  main,  holy,  we  are  yet  not  inclined  to  admit 
promptly  the  premise,  that  they  may  after  Jesus'  death 
have  retrograded  to  the  Jewish  orthodox  way  of  observing 
it.  Not  only  in  view  of  the  various  moments  put  forth 
above  to  illustrate  Jesus'  impugning  of  the  genuine  Jewish 
conception  of  the  authority  and  obligation  of  the  Sabbath, 
and  the  apostles'  partial  levity  concerning  it  which  they 
evinced  while  connected  with  him,  are  we  reluctant  to  con- 
cede  that  premise.     But,  aside   from   tjjese  points  of  con- 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  233 

sideration,  we  think  ourselves  entitled  to  conjecture,  on  the 
ground  of  a  Rabbinical  passage  to  be  reproduced  imme- 
diately, that  the  customary  Jewish  reverence  for  the  Sab- 
bath was,  as  time  advanced,  even  more  and  more  lessened 
within  the  Jewish  Christian  church.  We  will  let  the  reader 
judge  for  himself  of  its  admissibility  for  argument  and 
proof  in  this  question. 


CHAPTER  XVI. 


THE   JEWISH    CHRISTIANS    RIDE    ON    ANIMALS    ON    THE 
SABBATH  (?). 

In  the  Midrash  Rabboth  on  Ecclesiastes,  ch.  i.,  we  read  : 
"Hanina,  the  nephew. of  Rabbi  Joshua,  went  to  Kephar 
Nahum  (Capernaum,  the  old  Jesus-town).  There  the 
Mineans  (Christians)  preformed  a  magic  cure  on  him.^^ 
They  brought  him  riding  (or  made  him  ride)  on  a  donkey 
on  the  Sabbath.  Coming  to  his  uncle.  Rabbi  Joshua 
(whose  residence  and  school  was  in  Pekiin;  see  B.  Synh.  f. 
32),  the  latter  applied  an  ointment  to  him,  and  he  got 
well.  He  then  told  the  nephew  :  'Since  the  wine  of  that 
wicked  one  has  been  stirred  in  you,  you  dare  not  stay  any 
longer  in  the  holy  land.*  " 

The  whole  of  this  narration  sounds  genuine.  The  occur- 
rence set  forth  in  it  belongs  to  the  period  of  either  Trajan's 
or  Hadrian's  reign.  Now  we  are  well  aware  that  there  is 
no  direct  warrant  for  concluding  back  from  this  later  period 


234  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

to  the  earlier  of  the  nascent  Jewish  Christian  church. 
Nevertheless,  since  we  had  all  along  in  this  treatise  to 
nnaintain,  on  the  whole,  the  principle  of  continuity  as  to 
religious  theory  and  practice  from  the  public  life  of  Jesus 
throughout  the  earlier  ages  of  Christianity  subsequent  to 
him  ;  and.  farther,  since  we  know  Jesus  to  have  been 
so  antagonistic  to  Phariseic-Rabbinical  injunctions, — the 
•so-called  traditions,—  we  may  not  propose  amiss  that  the 
levity  of  riding  on  animals  on  the  Sabbath  dates  back  to 
the  earliest  professors  of  Christianity. 

Its  prohibition  was  one  of  the  Sabbath  restraints,  Rabbin- 
ically  denominated  Shebuth  or  Sheboth,  meaning  "  rest." 
The  ancient  Jewish  sages  imposed  many  such  restrictions 
on  the  people  to  serve  as  hedges,  preserving  them  the  more 
securely  from  the  temptation  to  such  infractions  of  the  Sab- 
bath as  are  real  labor,  that  is,  either  the  kind  expressly 
forbidden  in  the  Pentateuch,  or  coming  by  traditional  rules 
of  Scripture  interpretation  under  the  head  of  the  general 
command,  "thou  shalt  do  no  manner  of  work."  It  seems 
that  riding  on  animals  was,  since  the  earliest  times  of  the 
second  Commonwealth,  regarded  as  the  gravest  of  all  the 
Shebuth-restraints.  The  Talmud  (B.  Betsa  f.  36),  in  dis- 
cussing the  cause  of  this  prohibition,  propounds  first,  that  it 
was  instituted  by  the  sages  to  prevent  the  severer  trespass 
of  exceeding  the  Sabbath-limit  of  two  thousand  cubits 
(see  our  Part  First,  p.  17),  but  rejects  again  this  proposi- 
tion, deciding  that  it  was  a  measure  intended  to  ward  off 
the  trespass  of  cutting  a  twig  off  a  tree  and  using  it  as  a 
whip.  From  whatever  cause  it  may  have  been  forbidden 
by  the  sages,  thus  much  we  know  for  certain,  that  it  passed 
with  olden  Rabbinism  universally  for  a  most  grievous 
violation  of  the  Sabbath.  It  was  provably  treated  as  such 
already  in  the  Maccabean  period,  and  very  probably  since 
the  days  of  the  ancient  Sopherim  "  Scribes."  As  to  the 
Maccabean  period,  we  may  adduce  the  following  Talmud- 
ical  relation  to  substantiate  our  statement:  "Rabbi  Elazar, 
the  son  of  Jacob,  states  (as  by  authority),  that  a  Jewish 
Senate  may  inflict  judicial  penalties  for  transgressions  of 
Jewish  observances,  though  not  prescribed   in  the  Mosaic 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  235 

code,  and  that  for  the  purpose  of  erecting  by  it  a  fence  to 
its  direct  commands.  As  an  instance  in  point  may  serve, 
that  once,  in  the  time  of  the  Syro-Greeks,  a  Jewish  man 
rode  on  horseback  on  a  Sabbath  and  was  brought  to  the 
Senate  for  trial,  who  passed  and  executed  on  him  the  sen- 
tence of  death  by  stoning.  This  was  done,  not  because  the 
offender  was  really  liable  to  such  punishment,  but  for  the 
urgency  of  the  then  circumstances"  (  B.  Yebamoth  f.  90). 
Rabbi  Elazar's  report  of  such  rigid  proceeding  in  the 
troubled  days  of  the  Maccabean  uprisings,  when  Hellenizing 
apostasy  had  made  such  pernicious  inroads  upon  Judaism, 
and  filled  the  pious  with  deep  alarm  about  the  future  of 
Israel's  pure  Monotheism,  is  in  itself  very  acceptable.  It 
gains  yet  the  more  probability  when  we  compare  with  it  a 
passage  of  the  Midrash  (  Rabb.  Gen.  ch.  Ixvi.)  which  bears, 
in  the  main,  the  stamp  of  unquestionable  authenticity.  It 
is  said  there:  "Jakum  of  Tseroroth  (the  notorious 
Alkimos  ),  the  nephew  of  Jose  ben  Joezer,''^  was  riding  on 
horseback  on  a  Sabbath,  when  they  carried  before  him  the 
beam  on  which  his  nephew  was  to  suffer  crucifixion. 
Jakum  said  to  the  latter  (mockingly)  :  '  Look  at  the  horse 
which  my  lord  (King  Demetrius  who  had  conferred  on  him 
the  high-priesthood)  has  given  me  to  ride  on,  and  look  at 
thine  which  thy  Lord  (God)  has  prepared  for  thee,  etc!'" 
While  there  is,  perhaps,  in  this  relation  the  anachronism 
of  putting  crucifixion  as  the  mode  of  execution  carried  out 
at  that  conjuncture,  which  really  belonged  to  a  later, 
Roman,  period,  there  is  otherwise  every  reason  to  believe 
that  the  occurrence  narrated  there  is  historical  in  substance. 
It  shows  forth  the  habit  of  the  frivolous  Hellenists  in  the 
dismal  days  in  which  Alkimos  was  high-priest,  to  deeply 
offend  the  sentiments  of  the  pious  Jews  by  publicly  riding 
on  the  Sabbath  day.  Like  that  degenerate  ecclesiastic, 
there  were  no  doubt  many  other  triflers  with  Judaism  who 
paraded  the  thoroughfares  on  a  Sabbath  high  on  horse, 
boldly  demonstrating  their  irreligious  license.  Such  state 
of  things,  intolerable  to  the  pious,  may  have  induced  them, 
after  they  had  gained  the  ascendency  over  the  renegades, 
to  decree  capital  punishment   on    all  those  who  would  not 


236  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

cease  disregarding  the  Sabbath  in  that  offensive  manner, 
though  they  committed  thereby  no  breach  of  the  Mosaic 
enactment,  for  which  alone  mortal  punishment  was  legally 
provided.  The  precedent  stated  by  Rabbi  Elazar  in  the 
above-cited  Talmudical  passage,  is  accordingly  easily  refer- 
rible  to  a  tradition,  one  of  the  historical  backgrounds  of 
which  was  the  narration  of  the  Midrash  in  point. 

However  this  may  be,  we  are  at  all  events  warranted 
in  assuming  that  riding  on  animals  in  public  on  the  Sab- 
bath, was  already  in  the  times  of  the  Syro-Greek  dominion 
held  as  a  most  reprehensible  obliquity  and  dishonor  of  that 
sacred  day.  The  same  applied  to  every  one  of  the  high 
festivals.  They  shared  all  restraints  with  the  Sabbath, 
except  those  of  labor  in  preparing  the  meals  of  the  day. 
The  threads  of  such  vigorous  condemnation  of  that  exer- 
cise on  the  holy  days  reach,  we  suppose,  back  to  the  days 
of  the  earlier  Scribes. 

An  analogous  instance  of  austere  perception  of  the  religi- 
ous regard  due  to  the  holy  days,  may  confirm  this  supposi- 
tion. There  was  a  serious  dispute  on  the  permissibility  of 
the  rite  of  the  laying  on  of  hands  on  the  victims  offered  by 
individual  Israelites  on  the  festivals,  kept  up  for  a  period 
of  about  one  and  a  half  centuries,  between  either  of  the 
several  presidential  pairs  of  the  national  school  of  Jewish 
learning  in  Jerusalem,  who  lived  and  succeeded  one 
another  during  that  period.  It  lasted  from  the  time  of  the 
above-noted  Jose  ben  Joezer  till  that  of  Shammai  and 
Hillel  and  the  divided  schools  of  these  two  sages.  It  was 
only  through  the  interference  of  Baba  ben  Buta — himself  a 
Shammaite,  but  later  convinced  of  the  error  of  his  school — 
that  Hillel's  opinion  was  authoritatively  adopted  as  the 
correct  one,  to  be  followed  in  all  the  future  ritual  practice 
( Jerus.  Chagigah,  ii.).  This  opinion  was,  that  the  rite 
might  and  should  be  performed  on  the  festivals  :  for,  he 
reasoned,  any  sacrifice  Mosaically  ordained  for  a  certain 
day  must  necessarily  have  the  virtue  of  vacating  it  as  to  all 
rites  pertaining  to  it  (  B.  Betsa,  f.  20).  This  view  of  Hillel 
was  consonant  with  his  other,  and  one,  by  the  way,  that 
made  his  name  so  famous  and   his  station  so  prominent  in 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  237 

Judea, — that  a  sacrifice  prescribed  for  a  "  fixed  season  " 
cannot  but  make  the  Sabbath  restraint  recede  before  it 
( B.  Pesachim,  f.  66).  Thus  he  argued  to  dispel  the 
scruples  of  his  contemporaries  about  killing  the  Passover 
victim,  if  the  fourteenth  Nisan  happened  to  fall  on  a  Sab- 
bath day. 

W'e  have  to  keep  in  mind  that  the  laying  on  of  hands  on 
living  animals  was  only  prohibited  by  the  sages  and  classed 
under  the  name  of  "  Shebuth,"  coming,  according  to  the 
commentator  Rashi  in  B.  Betsa,  f.  19,  under  the  category 
of  "  making  use  of  animals,"  the  same  as  riding  on  them 
does.  And  yet,  so  profound  was  the  awe  of  the  Mosaical 
holy  days,  and  the  apprehension  lest  they  might  be  pro- 
faned by  that  rite,  that  it  took  so  long  a  space  of  time — 
from  Jose  to  Hillel — to  overcome  the  objection  of  its 
possible  unlawfulness,  though  it  were  performed  on  such 
victims  as  had  to  be  offered  up  entire,  being  thus  an  act  per- 
taining exclusively  to  Divine  worship.  This  proves  con- 
clusively what  a  severe  sense  was  in  the  remoter  ages  of 
the  second  Commonwealth  put  on  the  use  of  animals  on 
holy  days,  even  when  they  would  not  do  any  labor  them- 
selves, which  alone  involved  an  infraction  of  the  Sabbath 
law  ( in  accordance  with  Exodus  xx.  10). 

The  riding  on  animals  correlated,  according  to  that 
commentator,  with  the  laying  on  of  hands  as  regards  the 
ceremonial  offence  involved  in  the  act,  was  doubtless  as 
early  as  this  rite  considered  a  serious  violation  of  the  holy 
days,  though  neither  could  be  classified  as  labor  in  a 
Mosaical  import. 

If  the  riding  was  in  public,  it  was  unquestionably  consid- 
ered a  still  greater  ofTence.  For  not  only  was  it  a  leading 
view  with  the  olden  Jewish  teachers,  that  any  irreligious 
act  done  openly,  in  the  sight  of  piously  observant  core- 
ligionists, was  intensified  by  the  scandal  thus  committed 
against  their  individual  religious  susceptibilities,  as  well  as 
the  affront  thus  offered  to  the  paternal,  Divinely  instituted 
religion  itself.  But  the  appearance  of  a  Jewish  person 
bestriding  the  back  of  an  animal  on  a  sacred  day,  and 
traversing  the  streets  and  quarters  where  a  general  solemn 

(8) 


238  THE    SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

quietude  prevailed,  will,  besides,  have  the  more  forcibly 
roused  the  indignation  of  the  pious  brethren  who  beheld 
him,  because  they  must  have  been  impressed  by  it,  that  the 
perpetrator  was  of  a  defiant  mind,  and  prompted  by  the 
base  motive  of  showing  ostentatiously,  that  he  had  cast 
behind  his  back  all  reverent  recognition  of  the  day. 

These  several  notions  on  the  use  of  animals  on  Sabbaths 
and  holy  days  were  without  question  transmitted  through 
successive  ages,  as  we  find  them  embodied  in  the  Rab- 
binical literature.  Consequently,  we  judge,  has  such  a 
transgressor,  all  through  those  ages,  drawn  on  himself  the 
utmost  detestation  of  every  orthodox  coreligionist. 

If,  therefore,  our  proposition  above  advanced,  that  Jewish 
Christians  made  no  scruple  of  publicly  riding  on  the  Sab- 
bath dav,  can  be  accepted  as  probable,  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that  the  true  Jews,  holding  such  an  act  a  real  and 
serious  violation  of  its  obligatory  rest,  will  have  spurned  at 
them  the  more  for  their  setting  at  naught,  additionally  to 
their  other  notorious  levity,  an  observance  that  had  such 
great  moment  with  them. 

Let  us  yet  mention  that  to  about  the  same  period  with  the 
before-discussed  narrative  of  the  Midrash  on  Ecclesiastes, 
belongs  the  apostasy  of  Elisha  ben  Abuyah,  the  Gnostic 
heretic,  by  the  Rabbis  nicknamed  Acher,  that  is,  one  fallen 
away  to  alien  and  false  religious  belief  and  worship  ;  see  on 
him  also  our  Excursus  B.  We  will  in  this  place  produce  a 
notice  of  his  disregard  of  the  Sabbath,  exhibited  by  the 
same  frivolity  as  we  premised  to  have  marked  the  Jewish 
Christians.  Our  conjecture  that  one  motive  may  have  been 
common  to  both,  we  will  bring  forward  by  and  by. 

To  dilate  on  that  Rabbinical  doctor's  heresy  would  carry 
us  beyond  the  bounds  of  our  present  purpose.  We  do 
it  in  our  larger,  utipublished  work,  in  the  division:  'The 
Gnostics  as  Mineans.'  Here  we  must  confine  ourselves  to 
the  brief  assertion,  that  he  leant  strongly  on  Gnostic  dithe- 
ism or  diarchy,  or  had  actually  turned  Gnostic.  His  Gnostic 
bias  was  probably  created  by  reading  Mineic  works,  that  is, 
those  of  the  Platonic  philosophers,  and,  in  particular,  of  the 
many  Christianizing  Gnostics  flourishing  in  his  day. 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  239 

It  is  said  in  Jerus.  Chagigah,  f.  yy,  that  he  once  on  a 
Sabbath  passed  on  horseback  the  school  of  Rabbi  Meir,  in 
Tiberias.  This  Rabbi  was  his  intimate  friend  and  former 
pupil.  On  being  told  that  Elisha  had  passed  the  place,  he 
suddenly  broke  off  his  discourse  and  went  out  to  meet  him. 
He  overtook  and  followed  him  some  distance  out  of  town. 
Before  parting  he  entreated  him  to  retrace  his  steps  of 
apostasy  and  return  to  true  Judaism.  Elisha  replied  that 
he  could  not  possibly  do  it,  for  he  had  heard  once,  when 
riding  on  horseback  on  a  Sabbath  which  happened  at  the 
same  time  to  be  Atonement  day,  an  oracle  announcing  to 
him  the  verdict,  that  he  was  irreclaimable  and  abandoned 
by  God. 

This  account  cannot  here  be  scrutinized  and  tested  on  its 
historical  merits.  True,  without  doubt,  we  remark,  appears 
to  be  the  mention  in  it,  that  he  was  habitually  slighting  the 
Sabbath  by  holding  cheap  the  customary  restraint  of  riding 
on  this  sacred  day.  For  the  Talmud  relates,  besides, 
previously,  that  it  was  he  who,  during  the  Hadrianic  per- 
secution, when  the  Jews  were  by  the  Romans  compelled  to 
break  the  Sabbath  by  labors  done  for  them,  schemed  to  see 
his  wretched  compatriots  coerced  into  positive  violations  of 
the  Sabbath  law,  whenever  they  attempted  to  evade  them 
by  some  mechanical  shifts  which  they  had  contrived  in 
their  pious  anxiety  and  awe  of  the  Sabbath.  It  may,  in 
view  of  such  Rabbinical  representations  of  Elisha's  char- 
acter, be  safely  affirmed  as  historical,  that  he  was  sharply  at 
odds  with  the  traditional  observance  of  the  Sabbath.  We 
at  least  hold  it  inconceivable  that  olden  Rabbinism  should 
have  coupled  his  name  so  directly  and  repeatedly  with 
circumstances  of  dishonor  to  the  Sabbath,  had  there  been 
no  foundation  for  it  in  authentic  tradition. 

Now  it  is  quite  possible,  we  hold,  that  Elisha  came  to 
value  the  Sabbath  slightly  by  his  Gnostic  speculations  that 
landed  him  on  the  verge  of  the  heretical  notion,  that  the 
supreme,  good  God  was  distinct  from  the  Creator  and  Giver 
of  the  Mosaic  Law.  If  the  latter  proceeded  from  an  inferior 
Deity,  then  the  Sabbath  could  claim  no  superior  sanctity 
or,  at  anv  rate,  no  inviolable  obligation.     This  conclusion 


240 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 


would  readily  be  made  on  such  a  supposition.  By  it,  more- 
over, he  would  little  by  little  be  led  to  a  levity  in  the 
observance  of  the  Sabbath,  such  as  is  noted  about  him  in 
the  Talmud. 

Possibly  there  was  some  affinity  in  this  regard  between 
him  and  the  Jewish  Christians.  These  may,  consistently 
with  the  implicit  denial  by  their  Master  of  the  Divine 
authority  of  the  Sabbath  law,  have  held  it  of  little  con- 
sequence to  treat  it  in  some  respects  with  that  license,  born 
of  the  thought  that  they  were  any  way  not  liable  to  God 
for  its  violation.  As  one  mark  of  such  license  may  be 
accounted  their  regardless  riding  on  animals  on  the  Sab- 
bath, which,  while  it  was  no  labor  Mosaically  prohibited, 
passed  yet  in  the  minds  of  the  orthodox  Jews  for  a  most 
frivolous  slight  of  the  high  honor  due  it  from  "  the  children 
of  the  covenant." 


NOTES. 


^*  Even  Keim,  by-the-by  the  most  learned,  profound  and 
comprehensive  modern  historian  of  the  life  of  Jesus,  who 
in  various  passages  of  his  voluminous  work  tries  hard,  yet 
most  inconsistently  and  therefore  unsuccessfully,  to  sustain 
the  pro-nomian  position  of  Jesus  (comp.  iii.  p.  113  ;  315  ; 
323,  24  ;  427  ;  362,  63,  and  chiefly  his  summary  in  vi.  p. 
401  ),  cannot  help  detecting  in  that  re-asserted  opposition 
of  Jesus  to  the  law  of  divorce,  a  repudiation  of  Moses.  We 
have  here  a  concession  by  the  foremost  critical  writer  on 
Jesus,  that  the  latter  had  in  the  instance  in  point  really  and 
decidedly  seceded  from  Mosaism.  Space  does  not  permit 
us  to  argue  with  him  on  his  assertion  that  Jesus  "  arrived," 
in  that  instance,  "  for  the  first  time  at  the  point  of  repudiat- 
ing Moses"  (v.  p.  30).  What  we  will  have  to  dwell  on  as 
to  our  present  purpose  is,  his  proposition,  on  p.  31  :  "Here 
was  a  point  discovered  on  which  he  could  in  fact  be 
indicted  before  the  Sanhedrim." 

Keim  does  indeed  not  mean,  that  the  repudiation  of 
Moses  as  such  made  him  liable  to  be  capitally  tried  by  the 
Jewish  high  court.  Nor  would  there  be  the  slightest 
shadow  of  a  warrant  for  an  assumption  like  that,  could  we 
even  think  him  capable  of  entertaining  it.  For  neither  the 
Pharisees  nor  the  Sadducees  would  ever  presume  to  elevate 
Moses  to  the  dignity  of  a  divine-like,  prophetical  being, 
such  as  the  Essenes  professed  him  to  be.  It  was  only  this 
philosophico-ascetic  sect  that  made  a  blasphemer  of  Moses 
punishable  with  death  (see  Josephus,  Wars,  ii.  8,  9).  That 
this  was,  on  the  one  hand,  due  to  their  overwrought  Neo- 
Pythagorean  reverence  for  the  teacher  Moses,  which  rever- 
ence, in  passing,  we  discover  likewise  in  Philo,  who  calls 
him  now  all-great,  now  all-wise,  and,  again,  most  sacred, 
and,  on  the  other,  to  their  anxious  caution  lest  the  primacy 
of  that  greatest  and  "true  prophet"  (so  he  is  designated 
in  the  Clementine  Homilies)  might  be  questioned  and 
infringed  on  by  the  rival  claim  of  any  one  of  their  own 
order,  which  had  itself  bred  so  many  would-be  prophets, 
and  the  sacred  and  secret  books  of  which  contained  with- 
out doubt  so  many  precepts  and  predictions  of  their  own 
illustrious,  prophetically  inspired  lights,  we  incline  to  hold, 


242  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

rather  than  seek  for  the  motive  for  such  severity  of  legis- 
lation in  their  religious  reverence  for  the  Law  itself.  For 
we  know  from  some  of  their  otherwise  Jewish  heterodox 
doctrines,  that  this  could  not  have  been  the  case. 

No,  Keim  was  not  so  extreme  as  to  connect  the  indict- 
ment of  Jesus  with  his  repudiation  of  Moses,  from  the  view 
of  the  disparagement  of  his  person.  He  had,  on  the  con- 
trary, in  mind  his  own  peculiar  construction  which  he  later, 
in  vol.  vi.  p.  46,  puts  on  the  accusation  brought  against 
Jesus,  of  "seducing  the  people,"  adopted  by  him  from  Luke 
xxiii.  2,  5.  This  accusation  of  being  a  Mesith,  "  seducer," 
he  lets  there  arbitrarily  precede  the  actual  deposition  of 
the  testimony  of  the  witnesses,  mentioned  in  Matt.  xxvi. 
60,  61.  The  charge  implied  in  that  criminal  term  is  to 
him,  that  he  was  *'  an  inciter  to  disobedience  to  the  Mosaic 
ordinances." 

Now  that  the  Synhedrin  could  not  have  tried  him  on 
the  charge,  nor  surely  convicted  him  of  the  crime,  of  being 
a  '  Mesith,'  for  mere  incitation  to  ceremonial  transgressions, 
might  the  accusations  even  have  been  drawn,  as  he  gives  it 
on  p.  47  of  the  quoted  volume,  from  the  "  rich  mine  of  the 
strong  earlier-uttered  invectives  against  the  hierarchy  as  a 
whole,"  should  be  known  to  a  learned  writer  like  him.  The 
relative  penal  provision  on  the  strength  of  which  Jesus  could 
have  been  criminally  tried  on  the  charge  of  being  a  Mesith, 
sets  forth  directly  a  seduction  to  false  worship  (  see  Deut. 
xiii.  7,  sq.,  and  Mishnah  Synhedrin  f.  ^7),  and  not  to  "dis- 
obedience to  the  Mosaic  ordinances."  (As  to  our  own 
account  of  the  provisionally  supposed  criminal  charge  of 
seduction  laid  against  Jesus,  by  a  legal  inference  drawn 
from  his  contempt  for  the  established  Temple  worship,  we 
have  to  refer  the  reader  to  our  above-cited  dissertation  on 
the  Essenes,  in  which  this  subject  is  discussed  "  ). 

And  yet,  while  we  have  to  confute  Keim's  sarcastic 
reflections  as  impertinent  in  the  question  of  the  charge  of 
religious  seduction  brought  against  Jesus,  we  cannot  refrain 
from  suggesting  that  his  anti-Mosaic  utterances  and,  partly, 
practical  course,  may  not  only  have  hastened  his  arraign- 
ment before  the  Synhedrin,  but  even  been  judicially 
charged  against  him,  though  no  mention  of  it  is  made  in 
the  gospels. 

And  here  we  will  express  a  view,  which  will  at  least 
throw  some  light  on  the  obscure  New  Testament  narra- 
tions   of    the    capital     incrimination     not    only    of    Jesus, 

*  See  Excursus  C. 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  243 

but  also  of  other  Christian  men  after  him,  in  the  same  cen- 
tury, a  view  which  is,  moreover,  associable  with  our  asser- 
tion, with  which  we  started  our  present  treatise,  that  Jesus 
denied  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Law. 

It  is  possible,  we  hold,  that  his  anti-Mosaic  utterances 
have  drawn  on  him  a  charge  of  blasphemy  which,  though 
Rabbinical  tradition  has  not  handed  it  down  in  the  relative 
penal  rubric  in  the  Mishnah,  Synhedrin  f  55,  56,  may  yet 
have  passed  as  a  capital  felony  with  both  the  Pharisees  and 
the  Sadducees,  alike  within  and  without  the  Synhedrin.  We 
mean  that  blasphemy,  on  which  the  statute  appears  in 
Numbers  xv.  30,  31:  "But  the  soul  that  doeth  (aught) 
presumptuously,  .  .  .  the  same  reproacheth  the  Lord  ; 
and  that  soul  shall  be  cut  off  from  among  his  people. 
Because  he  hath  despised  the  word  of  the  Lord,  and  hath 
broken  his  commandment,  etc."  Now  while  the  later 
Rabbinical  interpretation  of  this  somewhat  indefinite 
statute  was,  that  it  was  either  directed  against  the 
polytheist  and  idolater,  or  against  the  same  blasphemer  of 
God  of  whom  Lev.  xxiv.  15,  16,  treats,  (see  B.  Kerithoth,  f. 
6),  there  is,  on  the  other  hand,  a  sufficient  warrant  from 
another  place  in  the  Talmud  (B.  Synhedrin,  f  99),  showing 
definitely  that  it  was  as  well,  and  we  believe  rather  com- 
monly, employed  to  cover  cases  of  antinomian  heresy,  gen- 
eral or  particular.  The  sentence  of  the  Mishnah  (ib.  f.  90), 
"  He  who  declares  that  the  Torah  is  not  from  Heaven 
(  God),  has  no  share  in  the  world  to  come,"  is  there  sub- 
stantiated in  the  name  of  previous  teachers  by  reference  to 
that  Mosaic  statute.  In  another  relation,  also  credited 
there  to  antecedent  teachers,  even  he  is  denounced  as  a 
"  despiser  of  the  word  of  God,"  Avho  denies  the  Divine 
authority  of  only  one  verse  of  the  Pentateuch,  nay  even  of 
Rabbinical  injunctions  derived,  by  the  established  rules  of 
interpretation,  from  its  text.  On  this  last  exaggerated 
clause  we  need  indeed  not  reflect  here.  For  not  only  have 
the  Sadducees  never  consented  to  and  accepted  as 
obligatory  such  derivative  Rabbinical  ordinances,  even  the 
Pharisees  themselves  have  not  pushed  their  exaltation  of 
the  "institutions  of  the  Sages,"  or  of  the  periodical  cere- 
monial restraints  of  Rabbinical  councils,  to  such  an  extreme, 
as  to  hold  transgressors  of  them,  or  deniers  of  their  obliga- 
tion, liable  to  mortal  punishment,  by  virtue  of  the  statute 
in  question.  They  will  never  have  raised  their  own 
injunctions  to  the  dignity  of  the  "  word  of  God,"  so  that  a 
despiser  of  them  could  become  guilty  of  real  blasphemy, 
and  incur  the  penalty  prescribed  for  it  in  that  statute.  That 
the  Talmud   mentions   once  a  single  case    from  the  Macca- 


244  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

bean  period  of  infliction  of  capital  punishment  on  the  vio- 
lator of  a  Rabbinical  Sabbath  restraint  (  B.  Yebamoth  f.  90, 
and  Synhedrin  f.  46),  a  case  which  we  discuss  at  another 
point  of  this  treatise,  does  by  no  means  contradict  our 
assertion.  It  confirms,  on  the  contrary,  as  all  exceptions 
witness  to  existing  rules,  the  order  prevailing  among  the 
Pharisees,  that  only  those  offenses  were  to  be  capitally 
punished,  which  come  within  the  province  of  Mosaic  pro- 
visions. To  deviate  from  it  would  have  been  an  anti- 
Mosaic  innovation,  of  which  those  pious  and  devoted  Jews 
could  certainly  not  make  themselves  guilty.  The  less  so, 
since  they  would  by  it  have  opened  the  door  to  the  Sad- 
ducean  method  of  inflicting  penalties  from  personal  discre- 
tion, which  method  the  Pharisees  so  positively  marked  as 
heretical  (see  Megillath  Taanith  ).  That  single  case  must 
accordingly  have  been  unwarranted  in  the  minds  of  the 
Phariseic  doctors  at  large.  It  was  doubtless  only  a  meas- 
ure of  a  momentary  impulse  and  excessive  zeal  at  a  certain 
juncture,  at  which  frovvard  irreligiousness  prevailed  among 
a  certain  class  of  the  community.  This  view  is  evidently 
held  by  the  olden  Rabbis,  too;  see  the  cited  passages  of  the 
Talmud.  The  above-quoted  Talmudical  saying  which  com- 
prises heretical  opponents  of  Rabbinically  derived  decisions 
under  the  title  of  "  despisers  of  the  word  of  God,"  must, 
then,  be  pronounced  as  an  extravagant  theory,  and  can  at 
best  only  mean,  that  such  men  are  deserving  non-judicial 
reprin  and,  or,  at  the  most,  a  light  punishment,  but  not  the 
penalty  provided  in  that  statute. 

Different  it  is,  however,  with  the  other  part  of  that  say- 
ing, relating  to  the  enactments  and  general  contents  of  the 
Mosaic  code.  The  proposition  that  deniers  of  their  Divine 
origin  came  under  the  head  of  such  "despisers,"  and  were 
to  be  accounted  blasphemers,  must  by  no  means  be 
regarded  as  a  mere  theory  of  Rabbinical  doctors.  There  is 
the  strongest  probability  that  it  rested  on  a  settled  norm 
transmitted  from  former  ages,  in  which  grave  religious 
offenders  were  actually  incriminated,  by  the  authority  of  a 
powerful  Senate.  We  maintain  that  such  a  norm^  based  on 
the  statute  in  question,  actually  existed  in  the  times  of  the 
Synhedrin,  and  that  antinomian  heretics  were  called  to 
account  and  criminally  tried  on  the  strength  of  it,  by  this 
judicial  body  of  the  jfeivish  land. 

At  what  period  of  Jewish  history  the  Synhedrin  may 
have  first  made  a  practical  application  of  that  statute 
against  open  assailants  or  derogators  of  the  Law.  can  no 
more,  be  ascertained.  That  the  Christian  schismatics 
should   have  called  it   forth  for  the  first   time,   we  cannot 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  245 

think.  For  the  apo:  tatizing  Hellenism,  in  the  Maccabean 
times,  was  certainl}'  serious  and  grievous  enough  to  have 
demanded  a  rigid  interference  on  the  part  of  the  religious 
authorities  of  the  land,  and  also  the  practical  enforcement 
of  that  statute,  provided  it  was  employed  in  a  really  penal 
sense.  Nor  must  the  special  legislation  against  Mineans, — 
presumably  Jewish  Christians,  though  Essenes  and  kindred 
sectaries  could  as  justly  have  been  included  in  that  desig- 
nation, as  we  set  forth  in  our  work  on  the  '  Mineans,' — 
which  is  reported  in  B.  Abodah  Zarah  f.  27,  and  confirmed 
as  historical  by  external  literature,  viz.,  the  prohibition  of 
intercourse  with  them,  etc.,  induce  us  to  suppose  that  that 
statute,  too,  was,  by  way  of  special  enactment,  first  called 
into  requisition  with  the  rise  of  Christianity,  to  be  used  as 
a  judicial  weapon  for  dealing  with  this  new  heresy.  For 
that  legislation  belongs  to  a  more  advanced  age  of  Chris- 
tianity, about  the  latter  part  of  the  first  century,  when  the 
destructive  antinomianism  of  Paul  and  his  consummate 
deification  of  Jesus  (see  Epistles  Eph.  and  Col.;  Phil.  ii.  lO; 
Rom.  X.  12.  13),  as  also  the  intrusion  of  overbold  Gentile 
Christians  into  the  Church,  had  cast  a  bitter  dismay  into 
the  hearts  of  the  faithful  Jews,  and  when,  further,  the  pre- 
tension of  miraculous  cures  in  the  name  of  Jesus  by  every 
Christian  who  claimed  to  have  the  Holy  Ghost  with  him, 
had  more  and  more  increased,  and  threatened  to  make 
dangerous  inroads  upon  the  illiterate  part  of  the  Jewish 
people. 

With  much  less  justice  could  the  teaching  of  Abbahu, 
the  learned  Palestinian  Rabbi  of  the  third  century  C.  E. 
(see  B.  Abodah  Zarah  f.  26),  that  "the  Mineans,  dilators, 
and  apostates  need  not  be  tried  before  the  high  court " 
(  this  is,  we  contend,  the  real  meaning  of  the  words  "  we-lo 
maalin; "  there  is  to  be  supplemented,  *  le-beth  din'  or 
Mirushalaim  ' ),  be  brought  to  bear  on  our  point,  as  being 
an  analogy  of  a  special  legislation  concerning  Christians. 
For  it  was  merely  a  decision  of  an  apparently  private 
character,  and  belongs,  moreover,  to  the  later  time  when 
Gentile  Christianity  had  been  habitually  manifesting  a 
furious  hostility  not  only  to  the  Jewish  religious  ceremo- 
nial, but  to  the  Jewish  nation  as  such.  Nor  is  it  so  very 
certain  at  all,  that  Christians  alone  are  to  be  understood 
there  by  the  term  Mineans. 

We  have  to  remark,  further,  that  Maimoni's  dogmatic 
systematizing  in  his  commentary  on  Mishnah  Synhedrin 
xi.   3,   can    be  of  no  direct  avail  in  the  question  before  us. 


246  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

He  has  there  only  worked  out  Talmudical  statements  and 
sentiments,  coming  as  they  do  from  different  epochs  of  later 
history,  which  do  not  warrant  an  historical  conclusion 
being  made  from  them  for  the  times  of  early  Christianity. 

We  will,  nevertheless,  reproduce  the  substance  of  his 
casuistic  reasoning,  for  we  have  in  view  the  object  of  making 
it  appear  the  more  probable,  that  the  respective  theories  he 
advances  there  in  a  combined  form,  re-echo  fundamentally 
and  rather  accurately  the  disposition  of  the  ancient  ortho- 
dox Jews  towards  those  who  denied  the  Divine  authority  of 
the  Mosaic  Law,  or  assailed  or  exposed  any  of  its  appoint- 
ments. 

Respecting  the  sentence  of  the  Mishnah  quoted  above, 
that  "  a  denier  of  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Law  has  no 
share  in  the  future  world,"  Maimoni  propounds,  that  "  this 
class  of  unbelievers  are  kopherim  "renegades,"  and  deserve 
death  the  same  as  the  atheists  or  those  disputing  the 
existence  of  Moses  (  as  the  deliverer  of  the  Divine  com- 
mands). Such  men  have  broken  a.vay  from  Judaism,  and 
stand  without  its  pale."  They  are  to  him  '  Mineans,'  who 
have  by  their  apostasy  forfeited  their  lives. 

May  we  not  justly,  according  to  all  that  we  know  of  the 
orthodox  Jews  of  antiquity,  assume  that  this  representation 
of  Maimoni,  though  drawn  and  condensed  from  the  later 
theorizing  Talmud,  was  approximately  the  standard  by 
which  the  legal  religious  authorities  in  the  time  and  cen- 
tury of  Jesus  guided  themselves,  and  that  they  may  have 
adopted  as  their  judicial  norm  for  dealing  with  antinomians 
that  statute  of  Numbers  xv.  30,  31,  by  which  such  delin- 
quents might  be  treated  and  tried  as  blasphemers  } 

We  may,  further,  find  some  support  to  this  supposition 
in  the  comment  which  a  prominent  Rabbi  of  the  Hadrianic 
and  Bar  Cochba  period,  Eliezer  of  Modin,  made  upon  the 
sentence  of  this  statute  :  "  Because  he  hath  despised  the 
word  of  the  Lord,  and  hath  broken  his  commandment." 
He  observes  on  it :  "  He  who  profanes  the  holy  things 
( sacrifices  ),  reviles  the  festivals  ( that  is,  the  Sabbaths  and 
holy  days  ;  for  the  former  are  included  in  the  term 
moadoth  "  festivals,"  as  is  clear  from  Lev.  xxiii.  2,  3  ),  and 
breaks  the  covenant  of  Abraham,  our  ancestor,  though  he 
have  many  counterbalancing  deserts,  is  worthy  of  being 
cast  out  of  the  world."  (This  reading  seems  to  be  the 
original  ;  see  Sifre,  Numb.  sect.  112.  The  enlarged  version 
in  the  Mishnah  of  Aboth,  iii.  15,  appears  to  us  inauthentic). 

Now  while  we  are  not  so  dogmatic  as  to  regard  this 
post-Synhedrial  exegesis  of  a  Rabbi  of  the  second  century 
as  the  exact  norm  translated  into  judicial  practice  by  the 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  247 

former  high  courts, — although  it  is,  on  the  other  haiid^ 
possible  that  that  doctor's  youth  reached  back  to  the  time 
when  the  Synhedrin  yet  existed  in  Jerusalem,  and  he 
accordingly  spoke  from  the  remembrance  of  his  own 
anterior  notice  of  its  real  practice, — we  are  nevertheless 
perfectly  warranted  in  asserting,  that  he  has  by  his  com- 
mentation sounded  the  keynote  of  the  pious  Israelitish 
sentiment.  What  to  him  was  a  mere  theoretical  estima- 
tion of  the  relative  offenders'  liability  to  capital  punish- 
ment,—since  the  capital  jurisdiction  of  the  Jewish  Senate 
was  assuredly  out  of  the  question  at  the  time  when  he 
uttered  that  exposition, — was,  we  suppose,  in  the  period  of 
the  Synhedrin's  actual  and,  later,  pretended  power  of  life 
and  death,  that  is,  till  the  last  days  of  the  Jewish  State,  a 
real  cause  for  a  legislative  infliction  of  it. 

Sabbath  and  circumcision  were  since  the  cessation  of 
sacrifice  undoubtedly  held  as  the  most  important  and 
sacred  rites  of  Judaism.  This  can  be  proved  as  well  from 
multifarious  Rabbinical,  as  from  external  sources.  In  the 
Temple  times  sacrifice  was  pre-eminently  ranked  with 
those  two  rites.  As  the  sacred  provision  for  constantly 
procuring  expiation  and  atonement,  its  rite  was  commonly 
esteemed  of  paramount  import.  As  to  sacrifice,  we  have 
indeed  to  note,  that  in  that  Rabbi's  lifetime  the  exegetical 
observations  made  on  it  were  no  more  of  any  practical  con- 
sequence. For  it  had  ceased  since  the  ruin  of  the  Temple, 
the  only  remnant  of  it  having  been  the  ordinance  concern- 
ing the  bechor  "first-born  animal,"  which  was  respected  as 
of  perpetual  validity,  the  ex-priests  receiving  the  animal,, 
indeed,  as  their  obligatory  portion.  He  can  therefore 
scarcely  be  understood  as  having  alluded,  for  practical 
objects,  to  this  mere  remnant  of  the  former  extensive  sacri- 
ficial ritual.  Yet  we  must  not  for  one  moment  assume  that 
the  discontinuance  of  sacrificial  offerings  had  interfered 
aught  with  or  diminished  his  reverence  for  them.  It  was 
with  him  as  with  all  other  pious  and  devoted  Israelites  as 
intense  and  fervent  after  the  destruction  of  the  Temple,  as 
it  ever  was  before  this  national  catastrophe,  and  this  at 
once  from  their  reverent  valuation  of  the  respective  Divine 
ordinances  and  their  strong,  unbounded  hope  of  the  speedy 
restoration  of  the  Temple.  Are  we  consequently  not 
entitled  to  deduce  from  Rabbi  Eliezer's  exposition,  especi- 
ally since  his  lifetime  was  surely  not  very  remote  from  the 
period  of  the  flourishing  Temple  service,  that  he  inter- 
preted by  it  the  ground-sentiment  of  all  pious  Israel  of  the 
past,  and  no  less  of  their  judicial  religious  representatives, 
the  national  council  ?     Is  it  not  perfectly  plausible  that  the 


248  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

supreme  tribunal  of  the  nation  will  in  the  days  of  its  power, 
have  rigidly  avenged  any  direct  and  open  "  profanation  of 
holy  things,"  which  that  Rabbi  designated  as  a  delinquency 
worthy  of  death  ? 

What  he  meant  by  such  profanation  is,  we  aver,  not  the 
infraction  of  the  appointed  time  and  place  of  sacrifice,  both 
of  which  were  Rabbinically  included  in  the  ordinance  of 
Lev.  xix.  8  (see  B.  Zebachim  f.  28),  or  its  defilement, 
which  three  trespasses,  judging  by  the  representations  in 
the  Rabbinical  literature,  have  likely  passed  as  the  princi- 
pal ones  among  the  many  which  rendered  sacrifice  "  abom- 
inable," nor  any  delinquency  incurred  by  any  other  of  the 
various  conditions  of  ceremonial  abomination,  so  much  as 
the  express  opposition  to  aqd  obvious  antagonistic  neglect 
of  sacrifice.  For  not  only  do  the  parallel  propositions  in  the 
Rabbi's  declaration  point  to  the  latter-named  meaning,  but 
the  analogy,  for  example,  of  the  phrase  "  profaning  the 
Sabbath,"  which  everjnvhere  in  the  old  religious  literature 
denotes  an  actual  breach  of  its  law  by  forbidden  labor, 
compels  us  to  assume  that  he  had  before  his  mind  an  apos- 
tasy from  sacrifice,  at  once  by  avowed  opinion  and  exhib- 
ited disuse.  Such  a  profaner  of  holy  things  or  of  sacrifice, 
together  with  the  reviler  of  festivals  and  the  violator  of  the 
rite  of  the  Abrahamic  covenant,  Rabbi  Eliezer,  then, 
esteemed  worthy  of  being  cast  out  of  the  world.  May  we 
not  infer  from  this,  that  the  judges  composing  the  Synhe- 
drin  of  the  past  held  the  same  view,  and  practically  made 
such  antinomianism  a  capital  offence,  too  .-* 

If  we  should  hesitate  to  presume  this  of  its  Phariseic 
members,  since  the  later  Rabbinical  codes  offer  no  evi- 
dence of  such  penal  construction  of  the  statute,  and,  fur- 
ther, since  that  sect  was  withal  distinguished  by  a  mild 
legal  disposition,  is  it  not  at  any  rate  easily  supposable 
that  the  Sadducean  members  interpreted  it  in  such  sense 
and  purport,  denouncing  religious  delinquents  of  those 
descriptions,  as  well  as  others  whose  anti-Mosaic  demon- 
strations were  held  grievous  enough  to  call  for  a  deterrent 
visitation,  as  blaspliemers,  equally  punishable  with  the  blas- 
phemers of  the  name  of  Jehovah  .'  And  may  we  not, 
therefore,  fitly  suppose,  too.  that  the  Synhedrin  instituted 
an  indictment  for  blasphemy  against  Jesus  for  his  antino- 
mian  utterances  and  acts,  proceeding  in  this  penal  course 
upon  the  authority  of  that  statute,  although  there  is  no 
mention  in  the  gospels  that  this  was  a  direct  issue  at  his 
trial  .' 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  249^ 

A  further  support  to  our  view,  and  one  which  is  of  no 
little  moment  to  us,  we  find  in  the  Synhedrial  punishments 
inflicted  on  some  Jewish  Christians  after  Jesus,  some  of 
which  at  least  must  be  recognized  as  historical.  Let  us 
start  with  Stephen,  whose  incrimination  fell  one  or  two 
years  after  the  death  of  Jesus.  The  penalty  of  death  vis- 
ited on  him  was  stoning,  as  is  recorded  in  Acts,  vii.  58. 
The  charge  preferred  against  him  was,  speaking  against 
the  Temple  and  the  Mosaic  laws  (  ib.  vi.  13,  14).  That  this 
double  offence  was  treated  as  blasphemy,  as  Hausrath 
(1.  c.)  asserts,  we  could  by  no  means  allow,  if  that  kind  of 
blasphemy  were  to  be  understood  which  is  set  forth  in  Lev. 
xxiv.  16,  and  which  the  codified  Rabbinical  treatise  of 
Synhedrin  (  vii.  5  )  has,  as  we  are  compelled  to  presume, 
preserved  as  the  only  crime  of  this  denomination  for  which 
capital  punishment  is  prescribed.  Unless  Stephen's  judges 
can  be  supposed  as  having  indicted  him  capitally  on  the 
same  indefinite  grounds  on  which  the  enraged  priests, 
prophets,  and  common  people  declared  the  prophet  Jere- 
miah worthy  of  death  (  Jer.  xxvi.  8,  9),  we  cannot  see  how 
the  charge  of  blasphemy  for  the  attack  upon  the  Temple 
and  the  Law  could  have  been  sustained  against  him,  pro- 
vided, at  the  same  time,  that  we  adhere  to  the  view  col- 
lected from  that  Rabbinical  treatise,  that  no  other  derelic- 
tion fell  under  the  head  of  capitally  punishable  blasphemy 
than  that  stated  in  the  quoted  place  of  Leviticus. 

Now  that  the  supreme  tribunal  of  the  Jewish  nation  can 
not  be  thought,  at  that  advanced  period  of  systematic 
jurisprudence,  to  have  resorted  for  their  guidance  to  that 
old  mob  precedent,  will  readily  be  admitted  by  all.  Baur 
('  Paul,'  i.  p.  52  sq.),  too,  has  vindicated  that  Jewish  court 
of  justice  from  the  imputation  of  mob  irregularity  and  defi- 
ance of  legal  form.  He  even  rejects  on  this  account, 
among  some  other  reasons  advanced  there,  the  statements 
of  Acts  vii.  57,  58,  as  ungenuine.  His  conclusion  is,  that 
the  whole  affair  was  merely  a  tumultuous  popular  insurrec- 
tion againt  Stephen,  to  which  he  fell  a  victim  by  stoning. 
Now  while  we  will  not  dispute  the  possibility  that  a  multi- 
tude of  Jews  exasperated  at  the  "  trenchant  public  utter- 
ances "  of  that  pugnacious  Hellenist,  should  have  taken 
justice  in  their  own  hands  and  attempted  to  avenge 
on  him  pre-eminently  either  his  attack  on  the  Jewish 
national  worship,  as  Baur  maintains,  or  his  threat  of  the 
entire  abolition  of  the  Mosaic  Law  by  the  returning 
Jesus, —  though  lynch  justice  was  at  no  time  during  the 
judicially  regulated  second  Commonwealth  popular  with 
the  Jews,  and   they  were    ordinarily  most  jealous  for  any 


250  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

capital  cause  being  tried  according  to  the  fixed  forms  of 
law  (see  Ant.  xiv.  9,  3  ).''' — we  yet  could  not  understand 
why  the  penalty  chosen  by  them  was  stoning,  unless  we 
attribute  it  to  his  final  exclamation  by  which  he  apotheo- 
sized Jesus  ( ib.  56).  This  may  indeed  have  been  held  as 
blasphemy  by  his  executioners,  for  the  implied  imputation 
to  the  Deity  of  having  a  progeny  or  a  second  in  the  being 
of  the  risen  Jesus.  Yet  it  is  a  fact,  that  the  charge  of  such 
blasphemy  was  not  included  in  the  testimony  of  the  wit- 
nesses. Their  evidence  turned  only  on  the  two  above- 
named  points  ( ib.  vi.  13,  14).  We,  then,  have  to  ask,  for 
what  purpose  were  these  two  offences  charged  against  him, 
if  not  with  the  view  of  visiting  ihem  with  capital  punish- 
ment, if  they  were  really  committed  .-*  And  when  we  fur- 
ther inquire,  under  what  Mosaical  category  did  they  come, 
what  will  we  decide,.'* 

That  it  should  have  been  seduction,  is  out  of  the  ques- 
tion. For  this  applied  only  to  him  who  attempted  to  lead 
away  others  to  the  worship  of  alien  gods,  which  attempt  is, 
however,  not  provable  from  the  respective  sources  as  hav- 
ing been  made  by  Stephen.  Even  if  we  should  assume 
that  the  accusing  party  worked  out  such  a  charge  by  the 
aid  of  the  same  association  which  we  have  provisionally 
laid  down  for  the  cause  of  Jesus  (  see  our  essay  on  the 
Essenes  ),  namely,  that  Stephen  had  taught  others  to  fol- 
low Jesus,  as  being  the  son  of  God,  which  suasion  might, 
indeed,  have  been  construed  as  seduction  to  false  worship, 
it  is  yet  to  be  objected,  that  there  is  no  indication  whatever 
in  the  records  that  he  ever  did  publicly  teach  such  doc- 
trine. Since,  therefore,  the  charge  cannot  have  been  that 
of  seduction,  we  have  to  look  for  another  statutory  provis- 
ion which  could  easily  have  been  employed  in  Stephen's 
case.  This  we  find  readily,  in  accordance  with  our  view 
held  forth  above,  in  the  statute  of  Numbers  xv.  30,  31.  By 
it  Stephen's  transgression  was  amply  covered.  Having 
been  an  assaulter  of  the  Temple,  he  was  surely  to  be  treated 
as  a  "  despiser  of  the  word  of  God."  In  this  word  of  God — 
the  Mosaic  Law  —  was  not  only  frequently  enunciated 
the  dwelling  of  God  in  the  national  sanctuary,  but  was  also 
contained  a  large  portion  of  the  ritual  of  sacrifices  and 
other  sacred  offerings  constituting  its  worship,  all  of  which 
precepts  were  implicitly  reviled  by  Stephen  in  his  open 
assault  upon  the  Temple.  Again,  as  a  most  decided  "despiser 
of  God's  word"  he  assuredly  proved  himself  by  his  insinu- 
ation, that  Jesus  would,  at  his  Parousia,  change  the  entire 

*  See  also  Exour.'(us  D. 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  25  I 

Mosaic  dispensation.  This  defiant  disparagement  of  the 
whole  system  of  the  Mosaic  religion,  in  which  he  really 
was  the  "precursor  and  prototype  of  Paul  "(so  Edward 
Zeller  ),  was  certainly  a  flagrant  blasphemy  in  the  eyes  of 
the  orthodox  Jewish  hearers.  That  they  actually  held  it 
as  such  a  felony,  is  reported  by  the  author  of  Acts  himself 
(ib.  vi.  II,  13). 

Such  an  impious  attack  must  have  wounded  the  inmost 
affections  of  the  faithful  Jews.  It  was  the  rankest  heresy 
that  cculd  be  uttered.  It  sacrilegiously  negatived  one  of 
the  most  essential  principles  of  the  Jewish  belief,  viz.,  that 
the  Mosaic  economy  was  in  all  its  parts  of  Divine  authority. 
As  it  was  impossible  to  conceive  that,  what  God  had  once 
coipmanded,  could  at  any  time  be  repealed,  the  cogent 
conclusion  from  Stephen's  heretical  discourses  was,  that  he 
denied  the  Divine  origin  of  the  Law. 

If  the  objection  should  be  made,  that  the  author  of  Acts 
made  out  the  witnesses  as  false,  we  reply,  that  Stephen's 
speech  itself,  as  reproduced  by  him,  incontestably  shows 
that  the  charge  as  to  the  Mosaic  Law  was  genuine  and  true. 
For  let  us  inquire,  how  does  he  therein  represent  the  Law  .-* 
As  revealed  by  God  }  By  no  means.  He  designates  it  as 
"  lively  oracles  "  (not  as  "  dibhre  elohim  chayim,"  to  accord 
entirely  with  Jeremiah  xxiii.  36,  but  merely  as  "  debharim 
chayim"),  and  those  communicated  by  an  angel  (ib.  vii.  38) 
or  by  angels  (v.  53) — a  heterodox  notion,  which  likewise 
occurs  in  Paul's  Ep.  Gal.  iii.  19.  This  notion  was  in  itself 
to  the  orthodox  Israelites  a  downright  blasphemy.  It  was 
yet  increased  and  intensified  by  the  threat  of  the  imminent 
abolition  of  the  Mosaic  Law,  which  Stephen  had  uttered, 
according  to  the  testimony  of  the  witnesses.  It  may,  then, 
readily  be  assumed  that  the  executioners,  if  they  were 
laymen  out  of  the  multitude, —  which  hypothesis  of  Baur 
we  can  however  not  accept, — had  recourse  to  the  discipline 
which  the  Synhedrin  presumably  used  to  apply  against 
public  assailants  of  the  Mosaic  Law,  namely,  the  statute  of 
Numbers  forming  the  subject  of  the  present  dissertation. 
Let  us  yet  state  here  that,  notwithstanding  the  above- 
noted  objection  of  Baur  against  the  representation,  in  Acts, 
of  Stephen's  trial  by  the  Synhedrin,  and  several  other  more 
or  less  weighty  objections  made  by  him  and  other  critics 
against  the  whole  relative  account,  we  yet  fully  believe  in 
his  execution  by  the  sentence  of  that  high  court.  As  the 
execution  itself  is  left  unquestioned  even  by  such  critics  as 
Baur  and  Zeller,  we  are  inclined  to  regard  some  details  of 
the  narrative  that  render  a  judicial  trial  very  doubtful,  as 
an  addition  by  the  late  Pauline  author  of  that  work  (there 


252  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  '■ 

I 

is  according  to  Zeller  no  trace  of  its  existence  before  the  i 
year  170  C.  E.  ),  rather  than  surrender  the  prosecution  of  | 
Stephen  by  the  Synhedrin  as  unhistorical.  Since  it  is  pos-  \ 
sible  that  the  affair  happened  after  Pilate  had  been  recalled  j 
(whether  the  latter  event  occurred  in  36  or  37,  is  disputed),  i 
and  the  new  procurator  had  not  yet  appeared  on  the  scene 
of  his  official  activity,  we  can  well  conceive  that  the  pre-  ; 
ponderantly  Sadducean  Synhedrin  improved  the  interval 
to  proceed  exemplarily  against  that  religious  offender. 

As  to  Baur's  further  objection  rhat  the  Synhedrin  had 
then  no  autonomy  for  executing  a  capital  sentence,  and 
that  "  this  supreme  spiritual  tribunal  must  certainly  have 
had  sufficient  fear  of  the  Romans  to  pay  some  attention  to 
legal  form,"  we  reply,  that  the  analogy  of  the  execution  of 
James  the  Just,  by  the  younger  Hanan,  the  son  of  the 
ancient  high-priest,  Hanan,  in  the  year  63,  sufficiently  jus- 
tifies the  assumption  of  a  like  speedy  judicial  interference, 
in  the  absence  of  the  governor  appointed,  in  the  cause  of  ! 
Stephen. 

The  affair  may,  as  Hitzig  ( Geschichtedc:;  Volkes  Israel,.  1 
quoted  by  Keim  1.  c.  vi.  227,  28  )  proposes,  have  occurred  j 
under  Caiphas'  successor,  Jonathan,  wnose  hasty  and  harsh  I 
Sadducean  legal  justice  impelled  him  to  use  the  opportune  j 
interval  between  Pilate's  departure  and  the  arrival  of  his  j 
successor,  Marcellus.  And  it  may,  too,  in  passing,  as  the 
same  author  suggests,  have  been  by  reason  of  that  act  of  I 
judicial  usurpation  of  the  high-priest,  that  he  was  after- 
wards deposed  by  Vitellius  (Ant.  xviii.  5,  3),  as  likewise 
the  before-named  later  high-priest,  Hanan,  the  younger, 
was  removed  for  the  same  abuse  of  power. 

Having,  by  the  foregoing  argument,  as  we  hope,  suffic- 
iently educed  from  the  capital  indictment  of  Stephen  for 
his  impious  assault  upon  the  Tem.ple  and  the  Law,  a  sup- 
port to  our  view,  that  the  Synhedrin  of  old  made  any 
public  derogating  attack  upon  the  entire  or  only  a  part  of 
the  Mosaic  Law  a  capital  offence,  we  will  continue  our 
observations  on  the  other  judicial  persecutions  of  some 
early  Jewish  Christians  after  Stephen,  to  strengthen  it  yet 
more.  But  instead  of  directly  turning  to  the  problem  of 
the  execution  of  the  apostle  James  the  Less,  which  was 
nearest  in  time  to  that  of  Stephen,  we  will  at  once  attach 
the  accusations  against  Paul,  as  being  more  akin  to  those 
brought  against  his  congenial  precursor,  Stephen. 

That  Paul  was  in  his  polemics  against  the  Mosaic  Law  | 
much  advanced  on  Stephen,  should  be  observed  before  we  \ 
go  on  in  the  consideration  of  his  offences.  Stephen  had,.  i 
in  his  speech,  deferred  the  change  of  the  Law  to  the  time       1 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  253 

of  the  returning  Jesus.  Paul,  however,  declared  it  already 
abrogated.  His  leading  doctrine  of  justification  by  faith 
in  Jesus,  which  he  boldly  derived  from  Gen.  xv.  6,  moved 
him  more  and  more  onward  in  his  opposition  to  the  Mosaic 
religion.  Not  only  did  he,  like  Stephen,  proclaim  the  het- 
erodox opinion,  that  the  Law  was  given  by  angels,  and  not 
directly  by  God,  he  even  reduced  the  Law  below  the  level 
of  equality  with  the  "  promise," —  the  associate  doctrinal 
term  of  his  main  theory, —  in  the  notorious  contrast  set 
forth  in  his  Epistle  to  the  Galatians,  iii.  16-20  (see  on  this 
Baur,  '  Paul,'  ii.  196  sq.).  He,  further,  positively  and 
repeatedly  declared  the  whole  Mosaic  dispensation  as  una- 
vailing towards  acceptance  with  God  (Gal.  ii.  16;  Rom.  iii. 
20);  as  having  multiplied  transgressions  (  Rom.  v.  20);  and, 
in  fine,  as  being  abrogated  by  Jesus  and  through  his  death 
(^  Gal.  iii.  13;  Col.  ii.  14;  Eph.  ii.  15  ). 

As  to  special  commands  of  the  Law,  he  certainly  opposed 
violently  the  chief  one,  the  initiatory  rile-,  which  signal- 
ized in  the  consciousness  of  Israel,  and  no  less  in  that  of 
all  the  rest  of  the  Jewish  Christians,  himself  and  a  few 
Hellenistic  followers  only  excepted,  the  participation  in 
the  covenant  of  God  made  with  Israel's  ancestor,  and 
stamped  each  Israelite  a  ben  berith  "  child  and  member  of 
the  covenant."  This  opposition  he  put  forth  not  only  in 
the  question  of  the  admission  of  Gentile  converts  to  the 
Christian  community,  but  for  Jewish  converts  as  well 
(  Gal.  v.,  and  see  Baur  1.  c.  ).  Nay,  he  preached  against 
circumcision  even  among  Jews;  Acts.  xxi.  22  (Edward 
Zeller  finds  in  Gal.  iii.  10  and  v.  2  sq.,  the  Pauline  doctrine, 
that  none  who  adhered  to  Law  and  circumcision  had  any 
share  in  the  kingdom  of  the  Messiah).  In  the  place  of  the 
ancient  covenant  Paul  had  devised  a  new,  universal  one 
(Gal.  iii.  17),  that  should  embrace  all  nations  having  faith 
in  Jesus.  This  covenant  was  to  him  the /froj/nst"  msni'j  to 
Abraham  :  "  in  thee  shall  all  nations  be  blessed  "  (  Gen.  xii. 
3,  being  so  rendered  in  Gal.  ib.  8),  which  promise — 
enlarged  by  him  by-the-by  with  the  aid  of  a  disconnected 
phrase  in  Gen.  xiii.  15.  so  as  to  represent  it  as  not  alone 
being  made  to  Abraham,  but  also  to  his  seed,  which  seed 
was  to  him  none  other  than  Jesus  himself  (  Gal.  iii.  16  1 — he 
lets  be  centred  in  Jesus,  and  in  his  believers  made  one 
with  him.  In  this  covenant-promise,  he  teaches,  every  one 
from  all  the  nations  is  to  share,  if  he  has  faith  in  JesuK. 

His  judgment  on  Sabbaths,  festivals,  and  eating  laws,  in 
Cor.  ii.  16,  17.  compared  with  Gal.  iv.  911,  certainly  shows 
his  utter  disregard  for  those  Mosaic-religious  institutions, 

•  (9) 


254  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

as  far  at  least  as  their  obligation  on  his  converts  was  con- 
cerned. Even  the  eating  of  idol-meat — that  gravest  abomin- 
ation in  the  sight  of  Jews,  as  well  as  Jewish,  and,  later, 
Gentile  Christians — he  declared  to  be  an  indifferent  thing 
for  firm  Christ-believers  (  i  Cor.  x.  27  ). 

His  sentiment  on  the  Temple  worship  was  doubtless 
about  equal  to  Stephen's,  see  Acts  xvii.  24,  and  comp.  2 
Cor.  vi.  16,  also  Acts  xxi.  28,  and  our  Note  34.  [  The  state- 
ment in  Acts  xxi.  23  sq.,  also  that  of  his  taking  a  vow,  ib. 
xviii.  18,  and  the  double  mention  in  this  work  of  Paul's  fes- 
tival journeys,  which  would  appear  as  standing  out  to  the 
contrary,  inasmuch  as  he  is  in  those  accounts  more  or  less 
directly  made  to  reverently  value  and  adhere  to  the  Temple 
ritual,  are  either  ungenuine  and  mere  productions  of  its  late 
author,  whose  Pauline  apologetic  tendency  is  maintained  by 
the  best  critics  of  our  da}';  or,  if  they  should  have  to  pass  for 
historical,  they  must  be  pronounced  as  imputing  to  Paul  a 
*' contemptible  hypocrisy."  by  which  he  stood  incomparably 
more  condemned  than  Peter  (  if  Peter's  action — see  Gal.  ii. 
12 — implied  at  all  a  transgression):  for  he  would  then,  aside 
from  the  undeniable  violent  attempt  at  undermining  and 
destroying  practical  Judaism  in  the  whole  course  of  his 
teaching,  be  condemnable  also  for  the  grossest  inconsist- 
ency in  professing  at  one  time  things  as  true  and  oblig- 
atory, which  he  would  at  another  disparage  or  negative. 
Such  inconsistency,  it  may  yet  be  noted  here,  is  not 
unlikely  in  him,  though,  judging  by  his  own  assertion  in  i 
Cor.  ix.  20,  and,  again,  by  his  solemn  declaration  at  his 
alleged  trial  before  the  governor,  "  believing  all  things 
which  are  according  to  the  Law,  etc."  (Acts  xxiv.  14), — 
provided,  of  course,  that  he  understood  by  the  L  iw  which 
he  pretended  to  have  all  along  been  observing,  the  Mosaic- 
religious  ritual,  and  not  the  few  moral  precepts  which 
Christianity  had  adopted  from  Mosaism, — which  declara- 
tion is  so  strikingly  at  variance  with  the  renrrorseless 
polemics  he  carried. on  against  the  Mosaic  Law  during  his 
missionary  travels,  whereby  he  so  sorely  scandalized  alike 
the  Jews  and  those  Jewish  Christians  outside  his  own  small 
following]. 

The  cast  of  his  theological  doctrine  about  Jesus,  too, 
largely  exceeded,  as  to  the  intense  deification  of  the  latter, 
the  notion  which  the  primitive  apostles  and  the  Jewish 
Christians  in  general  entertained  about  his  divinity.  Is  it 
then  to  be  wondered  at,  that  the  Asiatic  Jews  accused  him 
as  a  teacher  of  apostasy  (Acts  xxi.  28)  .■'  His  assaults  upon 
circumcision  and  the  Law  made  in  Grecian  communities, 
had  doubtless  become  known  to  the  Hellenistic  Jews  resid- 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  255 

ing  at  Jerusalem.  These  had,  besides,  frequent  occasions 
of  personally  noticing  his  antagonism  to  the  Mosaic  Law 
(  see  Acts  ix.  29  ;  this  passage  is  by  Baur,  '  Paul,'  i.  ii  i  sq  , 
declared  inauthentic,  however). 

His  antinomian  assaults  are  further  attested  by  the  state- 
ment in  Acts  xxi.  21,  that  the  body  of  the  Jewish  Christians 
themselves  were  scandalized  over  the  report,  that  he  M'as 
"teaching  all  the  Jews  which  are  among  the  Gentiles  to 
forsake  Moses,  saying  that  they  ought  not  to  circumcise 
their  children,  neither  to  walk  after  the  customs."  The 
implication  of  this  statement  in  vv.  20,  21  is,  as  Baur  sug- 
gests, that  he  would  have  to  fear  the  worst  even  from  the 
Jewish  Christians.  How  much  the  more  must  not  the 
Asiatic  Jews,  and,  through  their  information,  the  rest  of  the 
orthodox  Jews  of  Jerusalem,  have  been  exasperated  at  that 
greatest  foe  of  their  ancestral  faith  and  forms  of  religion  ? 

That  the  Asiatic  Jews  have  really  brought  the  charge 
mentioned  ib.  xxi.  28  against  Paul  before  the  Synhedrin, — 
presided  over  though  not  by  Ananias  ( ib.  xxiii.  2),  if  the 
son  of  Nebedeus  be  meant  (see  Jos.  Ant.  xx.  S.  2).  but 
most  likely  by  Ishmael,  the  son  of  Fabi ;  see  Ant.  xx.  8,  8, — 
may  safely  be  accepted  as  substantially  historical,  to  be 
gleaned  out  of  the  vast  mass  of  accessory  and  additional 
matter  reaching  from  that  passage  of  Acts  to  the  end  of  ch. 
xxvi.  That  he  could  not  have  stood  "  before  the  high 
council  on  a  charge  of  violating  a  temple  by-law,"  as 
Hausrath  (1.  c.)  somewhat  contemptuously  and  superficially 
remarks,  should,  after  all  that  we  have  premised,  be  readily 
allowed  by  every  thinking  reader.  No,  he  stood  before  the 
Synhedrin  charged  with  being  a  teacher  of  religious 
apostasy,  to  be  "judged  after  the  law"  (  ib.  xxiii.  3  ;  comp. 
xxiv.  6),  and  that,  as  it  would  further  appear  from  xxiii. 
27-29,  capitally. 

The  accusation  laid  against  him  is,  in  a  more  general- 
izing and,  as  we  hold,  less  reliable  form,  repeated  ib.  xxiv. 
5,  6.  The  main  charge  seems  to  have  centred  in  his  teach- 
ing and  offending  against  the  Law  and  the  Temple  ;  see  ib. 
xxi.  28,  and  comp.  xxv.  8. 

(  As  to  the  additional  charge  of  speaking  against  the  peo- 
ple, ib.  xxi.  28,  this  could  surely  not  have  been  accounted  a 
capital  offence.  But  that  it  was  well  founded,  appears  from 
the  following.  He  positively  rejected,  in  Ep.  Gal.,  the 
merit  of  circumcision  as  the  condition  of  Israel's  preroga- 
tive over  other  nations.  In  his  argument  he  aimed  to 
establish  the  bare  level  between  Jews  and  Gentiles.  The 
highest  point  of  this  his  position  is  reached  in  Ep.  Rom., 
which  was  in  the   main  addressed  to   the  Jewish  Christian 


256  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

church  of  Rome.  In  it  he  aimed  radically  to  disabuse  its 
members  of  their  sentiment  of  primacy  over  the  Gentiles  ; 
so  Baur,  1.  c.  In  a  sense,  his  speaking  against  the  people 
may  even  be  found  implied  in  his  polemics  against  the 
Law.  For  in  Eph.  ii.  14,  15,  he  propounds  the  theory  of 
the  breaking  down  of  the  partition  wall  between  the  Jews 
and  Gentiles,  which  he  explains  as  identical  with  the  aboli- 
tion of  the  Law ). 

Now  as  regards  those  chief  points  of  accusation,  we 
have  to  ask,  on  what  penal  grounds  were  they  based  ?  As 
a  Mesith  "  seducer"  in  the  Scriptural  sense,  he  might  in- 
deed have  been  arraigned,  and  was  perhaps  so  arraigned  in 
Greece,  before  the  tribunal  of  the  proconsul  Gallio;  see 
Acts  xviii.  13.  For  he  not  only  proclaimed  the  ordinary 
Jewish  Christian  dogma  of  the  divine  Sonship  of  Jesus,  he 
even  raised  him  to  the  proportion  of  "  Lord,"  Kurios 
(Jesus  had  already  virtually  applied  this  title  to  himself,  in 
Matt.  xxii.  44,  or  rather  its  Hebrew  equivalent,  "adon;"  it 
was  yet  left  to  Paul  to  identify  his  Christ  even  with  the 
Jehovah  of  the  Hebrew  original,  in  Rom.  x.  11-13),  who 
should  be  "  called  upon  "  by  his  believers  (  i  Cor.  i.  2;  Rom. 
1.  c),  and  worshipped  (Phil.  ii.  10,  11).  Nay  he  exalted 
him  to  the  dignity  of  "Creator  of  all  things  "  (Col.  i.  16; 
I  Cor.  viii.  6)  and  '"Ruler  over  all"  (i  Cor.  xv.  24  sq.), 
acknowledging  still,  it  is  true,  the  supremacy  of  God. 
(  Compare  our  relative  remarks  in  Excursus  B.)  Yet  we 
find  no  evidence  in  the  respective  accounts  that  such 
charge  was  really  brought  against  him  in  Jerusalem.  There 
is,  then,  no  other  alternative  left  than  to  assume  that  his 
cause  was  antinomianism,  his  indictment  resting  on  the 
statute  in  point,  of  Numbers  xv.  30,  31,  by  which  his  guilt 
could  be  defined  as  blasphemy.  His  derogating  (and  pro- 
faning) of  the  Temple  was  already  in  itself,  in  accordance 
with  what  we  observed  above,  a  "despising  of  the  word  of 
God,"  apart  from  his  having  committed  this  latter  offence, 
in  its  general  sense  and  in  the  most  aggravating  degree, 
by  his  radical  teaching  of  the  abolition  of  the  whole  Law 
through  Jesus. 

This  consummate  antinomianism  was  a  most  decisive, 
crushing  blow,  aimed  at  the  jealously  cherished  belief  of 
Israel  in  the  Divine  authority  of  the  Law.  By  it  he  exposed 
himself  to  the  penalty  of  death,  the  infliction  of  which  the 
preponderantly  Sadducean  Synhedrin,  in  its  high  function 
of  punishing  offences  against  God,  claimed,  as  we  suppose, 
to  be  its  judicial  prerogative,  because  Holy  Writ  had 
adjudged  kareth  "extermination"  for  such  despising,  which 
penal     sanction    there   is   no   evidence    whatever    that    the 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  257 

Sadducees  had  not  intrepreted  in  the  sense  of  execution 
by  the  hands  of  the  legally  constituted  high  tribunal  of  the 
Jewish  nation  (compare  on  this  the  sequel),  especially  since 
Leviticus  xxiv.  16  had,  in  ordaining  such  execution  for  the 
direct  blasphemy  of  Cod,  offered  to  them  an  available 
analogy. 

That  he  escaped  that  penalty,  because  the  procurators 
of  those  days  and  their  subordinate  officials  cared  nothing 
for  the  religious  heresy  charged  upon  a  Jewish  offender 
(see  Acts  xxiii.  29),  as  long  as  no  political  misdemeanor 
could  be  urged  and  proved  against  him  (comp.  ib.  xxi.  38), 
is  well  known.  

A  little  later,  in  62  or  63  C.  E.,  James,  surnamed  the  Just, 
and  brother  to  Jesus,  was  put  to  death  by  sentence  of  the 
Synhedrin  convened  by  Hanan,  son  of  the  elder  Hanan  or 
Elchanan,  as  he  is  named  in  the  Tosifta.  [Whether  this 
James  was  Jesus'  brother  or  only  relative,  on  this  the 
modern  writers  are  not  agreed.  Doellinger,  '  First  Age  of 
Christianity,'  identifies  him  with  the  apostle  who  was  the 
son  of  Alphaeus  or  Clopas,  and  calls  him  the  cousin  of 
Jesus.  See  also  Renan,  '  Les  Apotres,'  p.  42  Strauss, 
1.  c.  i,  p.  260,  maintains  that  he  was  Jesus'  real  brother. 
This  writer  is,  moreover,  let  it  be  said  in  passing,  the 
only  one  of  all  the  theological  scholars  known  to  us, 
who  does  not  separate  the  two  James.  He  was  without 
-doubt  decided  in  this  identification  by  Ep.  Gal.  i.  19,  where 
the  personage  commonly  taken  for  the  apostle  James,  who 
was  martyred  under  Agrippa  I.,  is  designated  "the  Lord's 
brother."  This  stands  out,  indeed,  against  the  ordinary 
acceptation  as  authorized  by  Eusebius'  Church  History. 
This  ecclesiastical  writer  treats  of  them  as  of  distinct  per- 
sons, speaking  in  ii.  9,  of  "  the  apostle  James,  the  brother  of 
John"  (both  the  sons  of  Zebedee),  and  in  ii.  23,  of  "  James, 
the  brother  of  the  Lord."  The  former  is  known  as  one  of 
the  three  leading  apostles — the  three  pillars,  as  Paul  styles 
them  (Gal.  ii.  9).  He  was  most  likely  the  leader  of  the 
earliest  Church;  see  ib.  12,  Acts  xv.  13,  xxi.  18.  The  latter 
passes  in  Church  history  as  a  later  saint,  and  is  supposed 
to  have  become  the  head  of  the  Church  after  the  death  of 
his  namesake,  the  apostle.] 

In  those  troubled  days  in  which  the  fanatical  Sicarii,  in 
their  fiery  hatred  of  the  Roman  supremacy,  had  caused  so 
•much  disorder  (see  Ant.  xx.  8,  10)^  and  Messianic  pre- 
tenders had  all  along  kept  the  Roman  authorities  in  suspi- 
<;ion  of  rebellious  attempt?  (  see  our  Note  20,  and  especially 
Acts  xxi.  38  ).  it  is  not  strange  that  a  pontifex  of  the  family 
of  the   Sadducean    tyrant,    Hanan    the  elder,   should    have 


258  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

summarily  proceeded  against  the  head  of  the  young  Chris- 
tian church,  who  may  have  been  more  profuse  than  the  rest 
in  unguarded  language  concerning  the  second  coming  of 
Jesus  as  the  Messiah.  Hegesippus,  in  Eusebius.  Eccles. 
Hist.  ii.  23,  does  indeed  make  James  proclaim,  while  placed 
upon  a  wing  of  the  Temple,  that  Jesus  "  was  about  ta 
come  on  the  clouds  of  heaven," — a  testimony  to  Jesus 
which  he  had  doubtless  frequently  spoken  forth,  and 
which  had,  as  that  writer  reports  in  the  same  place,  practi- 
cally aroused  a  tumult  at  the  time  of  which  he  speaks,  so- 
that  the  rulers  became  fearful  of  the  "  danger,  that  the 
people  would  now  expect  Jesus  as  the  Messiah."  Or  it 
may  be,  that  that  pontifex  singled  him  out  as  a  terrifying 
example,  for  being  the  representative  of  that  body  of  Jews 
whose  chief  dogma  was,  the  past  and  future  Messiahdom  of 
Jesus.  Says  the  Author  of  "  Supernatural  Religion,"  iii. 
120,  seq.:  "There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the  reality  and 
universality  of  the  belief,  in  the  Apostolic  Church,  in  the 
immediate  return  of  the  glorified  Messiah  and  'speedy  end 
of  all  things.'"  That  the  primitive  Apostles,  also  Paul, 
fervently  cherished  such  expectation,  is  evident  from  i  Ep. 
John  ii.  28,  iii.  2  ;  Apocal.  xxii  ;  Ep.  James  w.  T.^  \  i  Ep. 
Peter  iv.  7,  13,  and  comp.  Acts  ii.;  i  Thess.  iv.  15,  seq,  v. 
23  ;  see  also  2  Ep.  Peter  iii.  Nor  can  we  doubt  that  the 
Jewish  Christians  made  no  secret  of  this  doctrine.  There 
is  all  likelihood  that  they  openly  and  loudly  avowed  it. 
Now  as  to  this  intense  Messianic  expectation  it  is  very 
probable,  that  the  Sadducean  ruler  had  strongly  and  bitterly- 
resented  it  from  political  motives  alone.  It  bore  too 
decidedly  on  the  delicate  relations  of  the  Jewish  people  to 
the  Roman  authorities,  affecting  directly  his  own  interests, 
as  also  the  existent  national  establishments  generally.  Nor 
is  it  at  all  unlikely  that  he  with  his  other  Sadducenn  col- 
leagues had  taken  grave  offence  at  the  Christian  resurrec- 
tion-belief, which  was  so  closely  connected  and  so 
expressly  urged  with  that  doctrine.  Yet  all  this  may  not 
have  appeared  to  Hanan  a  sufficient  cause  for  instituting  a 
judicial  prosecution  against  James,  the  chief  of  the  Jerusa- 
lemite  Church.  He  therefore,  we  suggest,  brought  that 
general  charge  against  him,  which  Josephus  reports,  that 
of  Law-breaking  (  Ant.  xx.  9,  i  ).  [  To  the  Greek  term 
employed  by  Josephus,  "  antinomianism  "  corresponds. 
The  older  Rabbis  stigmatized  a  Law-breaker  either  as 
Epicurean,  (  see  Sifre..  Numb.  112)  or,  more  frequently,  as 
Mumar  "turned  away  from  the  Law."  The  latter  title  was 
denounced  as  well  for  a  partial  as  for  the  entire  apostasy 
from    the    Law.     If  it  was  of  the  gravest  nature,  a  failing 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  259 

away  to  polytheism  or  idolatry,  then  the  stigma  was  usually 
'  Min  ' — the  etymology  of  which  term  we  discuss  in  our 
work  on  the  Mineans.  For  Min  the  Rabbis  used  at 
times  the  scornful  name  '  Sadducee,'  because  the  Sadducean 
sect  too  were  by  them  held  as  real  heretics].  If  this 
accusation  was  no  mere  pretence,  but  had  some  foundation 
in  the  fact  of  a  real  offence  or  offences,  we  may  look  for  it 
in  his  Essenic  antagonism  to  the  sacrificial  Temple 
worship.  James  was  unquestionably  a  sectarian  Ebionite, 
or  Christian  Essene.  Whether  or  not  the  partial  Essenism 
of  Jesus  and  the  Ebionism  of  James,  his  brother,  may  be 
tracked  to  their  parental  family  (  Essenes  lived  in  every 
city  ;  see  Wars,  ii.  8,  4),  of  whom  Hausrath,  '  N.  T.  Times,* 
ii.  130,  asserts  that  "their  tendency  towards  strictness  can 
be  recognized  in  the  Essenic-coloured  ascetic  life  of  Jesus* 
brother,  James"  (which  view,  put  into  our  own  words — for 
we  apprehend  the  Essenes  as  an  heterodox  sect — would  be 
equal  to  this,  that  the  family  professed  heretical  Essenism), 
thus  much  is  at  any  rate  sufficiently  well  attested,  that 
James  was  an  adherent  of  the  Ebionite  sect.  Hegesippus 
states  about  him,  that  "  he  drank  neither  wine  nor  fer- 
mented liquors,  and  abstained  from  animal  food." 

This  was  surely  a  pronounced  trait  of  Ebionism.  Aside 
from  this  individual  peculiarity,  we  have  to  declare  it  as 
indisputable,  that  the  leading  spirit  of  the  entire  primitive 
Jewish  Christian  church,  presided  over  first,  as  it  is  sup- 
posed, by  the  apostle  James,  and  then  by  James  the  Just, 
was  prominently  Essenic.  The  F2ssenic  disregard  for  the 
goods  of  this  world  and  the  communistic  system,  were  not 
only  constitutional  in  it,  but  would  even  without  this 
organic  peculiarity  have  naturally  been  produced  by  the 
belief  of  those  Jewish  Christians  in  the  speedy  end  of  the 
then  world  (see  Renan,  '  Les  Apotres,'  p.  64). 

We  discover,  further,  a  remarkable  trait  of  affinity  of 
that  Church  with  the  Essenic  sect  in  the  well-known 
decrees  of  its  earlier  council,  headed  by  the  apostle  James; 
see  Acts  xv.  This  council  is  there  reported  to  have  laid 
down  four  points  of  precept  for  the  admission  of  Gentile 
converts  into  the  Christian  community.  Their  genuineness 
has  indeed  been  called  in  question  by  several  modern 
critics  of  note.  We  cannot  here  estimate  their  various 
opinions  and  arguments.  The  conclusion  we,  on  our  part, 
have  reached  concerning  them  is,  that  they  are  authentic 
so  far, —  but  only  so  far, —  that  the  council  of  the  Jerusa- 
lemite  Church  issued  them  as  a  norm  for  the  conversion  to 
the  new  creed  of  those  Gentiles,  who  would  not  submit  to 
the  initiatorv   rite   and   with   it  to   the  observance   of  that 


260  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

range  of  Mosaic  laws  held  incumbent  on  every  Christian. 
They  were  devised  in  about  the  same  manner,  as  the  so- 
called  seven  Noachian  precepts  were  introduced  by  the 
orthodox  Jews  for  the  reception  of  those  Rabbinically 
designated  '  Gere  Toshab,'  or,  as  they  were  also,  though 
less  frequently,  named,  the  '  God-fearing,'  from  the  Gentiles. 
As  little  as  these  attained,  by  the  acceptance  of  the  seven 
precepts,  to  the  perfect  title  of 'sons  of  the  covenant,'  and 
in  especial  to  the  privilege  of  unimpeded  intermarriage 
with  born  Jews,  so  little,  we  hold,  were  those  converts  to 
Christianity,  for  whom  the  four  decisions  of  the  apostolic 
council  were  framed,  ever  intended  to  be  regarded  as  fully 
and  equally  incorporated  members  of  the  Jewish  Christian 
community.  It  is  this  comparative  authenticity  alone  that 
we  can  accord  to  those  decisions.  Yet,  on  the  other  hand, 
we  strongly  incline  to  maintain  for  them  this  degree  of 
authenticity,  rather  than  totally  reject  them  as  unhistorical, 
as  to  the  period  to  which  they  are  credited,  as  Renan,  Baur 
and  others  have  done.  For  they  not  only  occur  three 
times  in  the  s-^me  work  (  Acts  xv.  20,  29,  xxi.  25  \  and 
recur,  in  the  main,  in  the  later  Ebionite  production,  the 
Clementine  Homilies,  vii.  4,  8  (  which  work,  even  if  we  may 
not  regard  it  with  Clement  of  Alexandria  as  the  authentic 
record  of  Peter's  preaching,  is  at  any  rate  a  true  exposi- 
tion of  Ebionite  views  and  regulations ),  as  directions 
given  by  Peter  for  the  conduct  of  the  Gentile  Christian 
converts  of  Tyre  and  Sidon  ;  but  their  entire  tenor  and 
internal  interconnection  seem  to  us  to  point  unmistakably 
to  Ebionite  principles,  prevailing  with  rhe  three  "  pillar 
apostles,"  one  of  whom,  James,  was  the  chief  of  the  primi- 
tive Church. 

Now  to  consider  those  four  decrees  as  the  "  ensemble  of 
Noachian  precepts"  (so  Renan;  they  are  enumerated  in  B. 
Synhedrin  f.  56).  would  in  our  opinion  be  going  too  far. 
We  own  the  resemblance  of  the  former  to  some  of  the 
latter.  Their  intent  may  even,  on  the  whole,  be  construed 
as  identical  in  both.  But  since  four  out  of  the  seven  pre- 
cepts do  not  at  all  occur  in  the  apostolic  decrees,  viz.,  rob- 
bery (theft),  murder,  blasphemy,  and  Mosaic  judicial  laws, 
we  cannot  take  them  as  a  direct  imitation  and  embodiment 
of  these  requirements  for  Gentile  converts  handed  down  by 
Rabbinical  tradition. 

We  prefer  to  assume  that  the  apostolic  council  in 
devising  those  four  decrees,  acted  entirely  independently 
of  those  seven  precepts.  This  would  appear  to  us  clearly 
already  from  Peter's  before-noted  direction  for  Gentile  con- 
verts, in  the  Clementine  Homilies.   He  adds  there  the  warn- 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  26 1 

ing  against  eating  dead  flesh  and  that  of  strangled  beasts — a 
prohibition  not  enumerated  among  those  seven  precepts, 
but  which  is  yet  prescribed  for  proselytes  in  Lev.  xvii.  i5- 
He,  further,  in  the  direction  for  Tyre,  enjoins  on  the  con- 
verts the  abstention  from  "  all  unclean  things,"  the  same 
"  which  the  God-fearing  Israelites  have  heard,"  that  means, 
all  or  at  least  most  of  the  ordinances  of  religious  purity  pre- 
scribed in  the  Mosiac  code,  of  which  he  names  in  particular, 
in  the  admonition  for  Sidon,  washing  after  coition,  and 
menstrual  female  purifications;  compare  Lev.  xv.  i8,  19. 
From  this  it  is  evident  that  the  Peter  of  the  Homilies  was 
not  guided  by  the  Rabbinically  transmitted  regulations  for 
proselytes,  but  framed  his  own,  partly  on  the  model  of  the 
Pentateuch,  and  partly  on  the  ruling  principles  of  the 
Ebionite  sj'stem.  Like  him,  we  hold,  was  the  real  apostle 
Peter,  as  also  John  and  James,  determined  in  the  fixation 
of  the  four  rules,  not  by  the  Rabbinical  tradition,  but  on 
the  one  side  by  a  direct  reference  to  the  respective  Mosaic 
ordinances,  and  on  the  other  by  the  prevailing  doctrines  of 
the  Essenic  sect. 

These  four  rules  appear  to  us  as  bearing  pre-eminently 
an  Essenic  stamp,  that  is,  a  demonological  relation.  We 
cannot  here  attempt  to  illustrate  how  much  of  the  dualism 
of  the  Essenes  and  the  Apocryphal  literature  had  already 
got  hold  of  the  thought  of  Jesus.  But  we  have  to  assert  as 
immediately  to  our  purpose,  that  at  all  events  the  minds  of 
the  chief  apostles  were,  jud.ging  by  three  out  of  the  four 
decrees  for  proselytes,  preoccupied  with  those  dualistic 
notions. 

We  take  on  ourselves  to  affirm,  that  the  interdiction  of 
idol-meat,  flesh  of  strangled  animals,  and  blood,  points  chiefly 
to  Essenism.  As  to  idol-meat,  it  is  to  be  remarked  that 
alike  the  Genlile  and  Jewish  Christians  of  the  first  centuries 
condemned  and  abhorred  it  as  the  "table"  or  "  repast  of 
the  demons"  (  a  stigma  that  took  its  rise,  perhaps,  from  the 
Septuagint  in  Isa.  Ixv,  ti);  see  Origen,  Against  Celsus, 
viii.  30  ;  Clem.  Hom.  I.  c  ;  i  Cor.  v.  21.  That  the  two  other 
injunctions  have  also  a  demoniacal  bearing,  may  be  gathered 
from  the  declaration  of  Origen  in  that  place  :  "  What  is 
offered  to  idols  is  offered  to  demons,  and  man  devoted  to 
God  must  not  become  a  companion  at  the  table  of  the 
demons.  We  should,  further,  abstain  from  strangled  meat, 
because  the  blood  which  it  is  said  is  the  food  of  demons,  is 
not  separated  ;  that  we  may  not  pirtake  of  the  food  of  the 
demons." 


262  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

That  the  apostolic  framers  of  the  four  decisions  enter- 
tained about  the  same  sentiment  on  the  three  aforenamed 
of  them,  we  have  no  doubt.  It  was  pre-eminently,  we  hold, 
Essenic  demonological  impressions  that  prevailed  on  them 
to  enact  those  three  injunctions  for  Gentile  converts  Their 
theosophic  abhorrence  of  every  sign  and  vestige  of  spirit- 
ual association  or  contact  with  the  devils,  was  mainly  active 
in  their  legislating  in  that  manner. 

We  are  at  the  same  time  far  from  denying  that  the 
fundamental  tone  of  the  sentiment  of  those  apostolic  legis- 
lators was  the  common  Jewish  one  of  those  days.  The 
ordinary  intense  Jewish  antagonism  to  every  form  of  pagan 
worship  rested  as  well  on  the  conception  that  the  gods  of 
the  heathens  were  no-gods,  as  that  they  were  evil  spirits;  see 
Deut.  xxxii.  17;  Ps.  cvi.  37,  and  in  especial  the  Septuagint 
in  several  places.  The  enactment  of  the  three  ordinances 
in  question  was  accordingly  properly  Jewish  and  unsectarian 
in  the  outlines,  inasmuch  as  it  laid  down  as  indispensable 
the  total  renunciation  of  every  trace  of  heathenism.  Even 
in  the  fourth,  the  negation  of  heathen  ways  may  readily  be 
found  stipulated.  For  the  moral  profligacy  and  corruption 
among  the  heathens  of  those  centuries  was  wide-spread  and 
deeply  settled,  and  had  become  most  intolerable  and  shock- 
ing to  the  pure  minds  of  godly  Jews;  compare  the  very 
frequent  connection  of  idolatry  with  fornication  as  peculiar 
to  heathendom  in  the  vast  Rabbinical  literature.  The  term 
"porneia"  of  that  fourth  ordinance  certainly  corresponds  to 
the  last-named  vice,  which,  in  the  original  generic  Jew- 
ish designation,  "zenuth."  includes  doubtless  incest  and 
unlawful  marriages  (the  "gilui  arayoth"  of  the  Rabbinical 
literature.). 

Yet  for  all  that  we  cannot  fail  to  discover  an  Essenic 
predisposition  in  the  apostolic  enactment  of  the  three 
ordinances  in  question.  Their  combination  obviously 
involves  both  a  polemical  reflection  on  the  demons  of  the 
heathens  and  an  extravagant  apprehension  of  their  existence 
and  power,  which  the  bulk  of  the  Jewish  nation,  for  all  the 
demonological  notions  infused  into  their  minds  in  the  cen- 
turies of  the  second  Commonwealth,  did  positively  not 
share.  We  have  not  the  slightest  evidence  that  the  ordi- 
nary Israelite  of  those  days  rejected  the  eating  of  blood 
from  a  religious  horror  in  a  demoniacal  sense,  such  as  we 
have  to  impute  to  the  framers  of  the  four  apostolic  decis- 
ions with  regard  to  two  of  them.  The  generality  of  the 
Jews  surely  abhorred  blood  only  for  the  Mosaic  reason, 
that  "blood  is  the  soul." 


THE    SABBATH    IN    HISIORY.  263 

In  support  of  our  proposition  that  those  three  decisions 
had  principally  a  demoniacal  bearing,  may  yet  be  urged  the 
repudiation  by  the  Ebionites  of  animal  flesh.  They  account 
for  it  themselves  by  reference  to  evil  spirits,  and  the  vorac- 
ity of  these  after  the  blood  of  animals.  In  the  Clementine 
Homilies  we  meet  with  three  difterent  accounts  for  their 
rejection  of  flesh-meat  ;  see  ib.  viii.  16;  xii.  6  and  12  (still 
another  is  given  by  Epiphanius,  Haer.  xxx.  18,  but  it  is 
scarcely  historical.).  We  advert  principally  for  our  present 
purpose  to  the  last-noted  passage  of  the  Homilies.  In  it 
Peter  sets  forth  the  eating  of  animal  flesh  as  first  introduced 
by  the  giants — the  bastards  born  of  fallen  angels  and  women 
of  the  earth  ;  see  Gen.  vi.  2.  "  They."  it  is  said  there,  "  not 
being  pleased  with  purity  of  food,  longed  after  the  taste  of 
blood.  Wherefore  they  first  tasted  flesh."  About  the  same 
sentiment  is  expressed  in  the  book  of  Enoch,  vi.  4-6.  It  is 
mainly  from  the  occurrence  of  this  sentiment  in  both 
works  that  Hausrath,  '  N.  T.  Times,'  i,  p.  166,  concludes  an 
affinity  of  thought  between  the  Essenes  and  other  mystics, 
whose  tendencies  were  similar  to  those  of  the  apocryphal 
author  of  Enoch.  We,  on  our  part,  vc^ould  base  on  this  cir- 
cumstance the  supposition,  that  among  the  various  theo- 
sophic  classes  of  ancient  Judaism,  whether  the  Essenes  or 
their  Christian  cousins,  the  Ebionites,  or  the  mystics  of  the 
Apocrypha  generally,  the  notion  prevailed,  that  the  use  of 
animal  flesh  is  to  be  abominated  chiefly  for  the  blood  it 
contains  and  for  the  necessity  of  shedding  it  to  obtain  the 
flesh,  blood  being  considered  as  the  food  of  the  demoniac 
beings  of  the  legend  of  Genesis. 

By  this  mystical  apprehension  the  apostolic  prohibitions 
of  strangled  meat  for  converts  on  account  of  blood,  and  of 
blood  itself,  are  easily  explained.  These  two  prohibitions 
have,  then,  the  same  relation  as  that  of  idol-meat. 

It  will  now,  we  expect,  appear  very  plausible  to  the 
reader  that  Ebionism  or  Essenism  inspired  the  enactment 
of  those  three  conjoined  apostolic  decrees.  Should  he  evqn 
have  any  hesitation  to  regard  the  leaders  of  the  primitive 
Church,  prominently  the  apostles  James  and  Peter,  as  real 
Christianized  Essenes,  he  will  at  least  recognize  with  us  in 
that  enactment  the  adopted  spirit  and  tendencies  of 
Essenism.  From  this  we  may  be  permitted  to  draw  the 
farther  conclusion  that,  as  the  rejection  of  animal  flesh  and 
of  sacrifice  was,  as  Zeller,  '  The  Philosophy  of  the  Greeks,' 
iii.  2,  points  out,  always  combined  in  the  theory  of  the 
ancient  ascetics,  and,  further,  as  such  combination  is  posi- 
tively and  variously  attested  of  the  later  Ebionites  who,  as 
well   as  the  earlier,  sprung   from    the  Essenes,  or,  at  any 


264  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

rate,  adopted  the  doctrines  of  this  sect,  the  opposition  to 
the  sacrificial  Temple  worship  was  peculiar  to  all  those 
early  Jewish  Christians  who  manifested  an  Essenic  or 
Ebionite  affiliation  or  leaning.  If  then,  as  we  suggested, 
dualistic  Essenism  underlies  the  three  out  of  the  four 
apostolic  decrees,  we  may  safely  account  the  three  apostles 
Peter,  John  and  James,  the  last-named  in  particular,  who 
was  the  chief  of  the  council  in  which  they  were  enacted,  as 
direct  antagonists  of  the  Temple  ritual  from  that  sectarian 
predisposition  alone,  aside  from  the  other  consideration, 
which  should  always  be  kept  in  mind,  that  they  must  have 
strenuously  aimed  to  imitate  the  example  of  their  Master, 
who  was  a  very  decided  opponent  of  it. 

And  in  like  manner,  but  with  yet  stronger  probability, 
we  may  infer  that  James  the  Just,  Jesus'  brother,  was  a  pro- 
nounced antagonist  of  sacrifice.  For  of  him  does  Hegesip- 
pus  directly  assert,  that  he  rejected  animal  flesh.  With 
such  rejection  that  of  sacrifice  was  doubtless  allied  in  his 
mind  and  teaching. 

A  clue  would,  then,  be  offered  to  the  real  cause  for  which 
he  was  tried  and  condemned  to  death  by  stoning  by  the 
Synhedrin  of  the  high-priest  Hanan.  We  may  fairly  sup- 
pose that,  as  a  stanch  Ebionite,  he  repeatedly,  openly,  and 
vehemently  inveighed  against  the  prevailing  worship  of 
the  Temple.  That  rigorous  Sadducean  president  of  the 
high  court,  we  further  surmise,  availed  himself  of  the  tem- 
porary freedom  from  Roman  surveillance,  to  visit  on  the 
assaulter  that  capital  punishment  which  the  Synhedrin 
had  already  in  former  times,  as  we  take  it,  been  inflicting 
on  violent  antagonists  of  the  established  Temple  ritual  and 
the  Mosaic  institutions  generally,  and  that  in  pursuance  of 
the  statute  of  Numbers  xv.  30,  31.  By  it  James  could  be 
indicted  for  blasphemy^  and  condemned  to  that  mode  of 
execution  which  the  law.  Lev.  xxiv.  16,  had  provided  for 
direct  blasphemy  of  the  name  of  Jehovah,  the  difference  of 
the  species  of  crime  not  interfering,  as  we  believe,  with 
that  Sadducean  pontiff,  so  long  as  the  same  denomination 
could  be  seized  upon  to  meet  his  case.  To  the  offence  of 
assaulting  the  Temple  service,  Josephus  alluded,  it  may  be, 
in  the  account  he  gives  of  James'  persecution.  That  offence 
can  be  understood  by  the  charge  of  "  Law- breaking," 
brought  by  the  high-priest  himself^  against  him  and  other 
offenders  ;  see  also  our  Excursus  C. 

We  must  indeed,  in  our  effort  at  strengthening  our  argu- 
ment of  antinomian  assaulters  having  by  the  Synhedrin 
been  prosecuted  as  real  blasphemers,  not  pass  over  the 
account  ofHegesippus  who  mentions  nothing  of  the  charge 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  26$ 

of  Law-breaking,  but  lets  him  be  martyred  for  his  Jesulogi- 
cal  Messianic  testimony.  The  penalty  of  stoning  which  he 
reports  as  having  been  inflicted  on  James,  would  at  the 
first  glance,  judging  by  his  entire  description  of  the  case, 
point  only  to  the  deification  of  Jesus  a.s  the  cause  of  his 
incrimination.  This  deification  could,  in  fact,  have  brought 
on  him  the  charge  of  blasphemy  that  came  under  the 
statute  of  Lev.  xxiv.  16.  To  meet  this  objection  from  the 
account  of  Hegesippus,  we  su^^gest  it  as  probable,  in  view 
of  Josephus'  statement  and  our  own  previous  argumenta- 
tion, that  the  felony  of  "despising  the  word  of  God  '  formed 
at  least  part  of  the  accusation,  and  that,  if  Hegesippus' 
report  can  claim  to  be  genuine,  he  was  arraigned  for  both 
species  of  blasphemy,  that  of  which  the  aforementioned 
ordinance  of  Leviticus  treats,  and  the  other  described  in 
Numbers  xv.  30,  31.  Not  only  is  this  probable,  but  we 
would,  by  this  explanation,  yet  gain  the  advantage  of 
harmonizing  both  the  accounts  of  Josephus  and  Hegesippus. 

The  deification  of  Jesus  for  which,  in  conjunction  with 
his  antinomian  blasphemy,  as  we  now  proposed,  the  Syn- 
hedrial  judges  may  have  awarded  the  penalty  of  death 
against  James,  is  attested  by  the  latter  writer  who  attrib- 
utes to  him  the  declamation  of  the  Christian  dogmatic 
phrase,  current  then  as  before,  that  Jesus  was  "  now  sitting 
in  the  heavens,  on  the  right  hand  of  great  Power  "  (  God  ); 
comp.  Acts  vii.  55,  56.  This  exaltation  of  Jesus  was  no 
doubt  severely  resented  by  the  orthodox  Jews  and  penally 
avenged  by  the  authorities,  since  it  was  ordinarily  attended 
by  express  epithets  of  deification.  It  was  yet  aggravated 
by  the.Ebionite  antagonism  to  the  Mosaic  institution  of 
sacrifice,  which  we  imputed  to  him  before. 

A  trial  for  antinomian  blasphemy  by  the  statute  of  Num- 
bers XV.  30,  31,  likewise  in  conjunction  with  the  accusation 
for  blasphemy  of  Jehovah  by  the  Christian  assertion  of  the 
dogma  of  the  divine  sonship  of  Jesus,  might  be  suggested 
also  in  the  cause  of  the  apostle  James,  the  son  of  Zebedee, 
who  suffered  death  under  Agrippa  L.  the  grandson  of 
Herod,  about  the  year  44  C.  E.,  were  we  not  informed  in 
Acts  xii.  2,  and  in  Eusebius,  1.  c.  ii.9, —  the  latter  reporting 
from  Clement's  seventh  book  of  the  'Institutions,' — that  he 
was  beheaded. 

We  demonstrated  above  the  apostle's  Essenic  sectarian- 
ism or  leaning.  It  is  therefore  not  too  much  to  suggest 
that  he  as  well  as  James  the  Just,  exhibited  an  open  and 
aggressive  opposition  to  the  sacrificial  Temple  service.  As 
a  valuable  support  to  this  supposition  we  mention  the  Ebi- 
onite  tradition  based  on  a  book  bearing  the  apostle  James' 


266  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

name,  that  he  "  spoke  against  the  Temple  and  sacrifice, 
also  against  the  fire  on  the  altar  " —  quoted  by  Hilgenfeld, 
History  of  Heretics,  etc.,  p.  431.  It  was  thus  he  could 
have  drawn  on  himself  the  accusation  of  being  a  "  despiser 
of  the  word  of  God,"  and  consequently  a  "  blasphemer." 
With  it  there  might  have  been  associated  the  charge  of  blas- 
phemy, and  perhaps  also  of  "ditheism"  (  abodah  zarah  ),  for 
publicly  professing  Jesus,  in  speeches  as  well  as  at  perform- 
ances of  miraculous  healings  which  were  always  attempted 
"in  the  name  of  Jesus,"  as  the  son  of  God.  While  this 
must  in  theory  appear  as  probable,  it  is  yet  to  be  objected, 
that  the  punishment  with  which  the  apostle's  offence  was 
visited,  would  not  tally  with  our  supposition.  He  was 
decapitated.  This  penalty  he  could  not  have  incurred  for 
antinomian  blasphemy,  or  for  blasphemy  at  all.  It  is, 
moreover,  to  be  remarked  that,  considering  ihe  apostle's 
cause  by  itself,  it  would  appear  that  the  proceeding  against 
him  was  not  at  all  by  the  ordinary  tribunal,  the  Synhedrin, 
but  that  he  fell  a  victim  to  the  arbitrary  act  of  the  king 
Agrippa.  See  Renan,  '  Les  Apotres,'  p.  201,  who  says: 
"  The  affair  was  not  presented  a;;  a  religious  one.  There 
was  not  an  inquisitorial  trial  held  before  the  Sanhedrin. 
The  sentence  was  pronounced  by  virtue  of  the  arbitrary 
power  of  the  sovereign,  as  it  had  been  the  case  with  John 
the  Baptist." 

When  we  contrast  both  proceedings,  the  one  against  the 
Baptist  by  Herod  Antipas.  and  the  other  against  the  apos- 
tle James  by  his  nephew,  Agrippa,  and  hold  in  view  that  in 
both  instances  decapitation  was  decreed,  it  will  indeed 
seem  quite  possible  that  both  autocrats  acted  on  their  own 
discretion  and  independently  of  the  Synhedrin.  Likewise 
seem  both  to  have  been  mainly  actuated  in  their  fierce 
resentment  and  decision,  by  political  motives.  Possibly 
the  cry  of  the  impending  return  of  Jesus  as  the  Messiah  — 
the  continuous  anxious  watchword  of  every  Christian  since 
his  death — had  jarred  too  dismally  on  the  sensibilities  of 
king  Agrippa.  in  particular  in  view  of  the  exciting  effect  it 
must  have  produced  on  his  illustrious  patron,  the  emperor 
Claudius.  This  emperor's  vehement  intolerance  to  Messi- 
anic movements  is  set  forth  above,  pp.  58  and  98  sq. 

Decapitation  was  withal,  judging  by  Rabbinical  tradi- 
tion, a  very  rare  mode  of  execution  with  the  Jewish  legisla- 
tive authorities  ;  see  Mishnah  Synhed.  ix.  I  sq.  Its  repeated 
infliction  by  Roman  officials  in  Palestine,  on  the  other  hand, 
suggests  the  idea,  that  those  Herodian  rulers  had  copied 
that  method  from  their  Roman  masters.      (See  on  Theudas' 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  267 

decapitation,  perhaps  yet  in  the  same  year,  44  C.  E.,  by  the 
procurator  Fadus,  Ant.  xx.  5,  i,  and  on  the  same  punish- 
ment of  a  Roman  soldier  bv  Cumanus,  a  few  years  later, 
ib.  4). 

Accounting  thus  for  the  proceedings  against  the  apostle 
James  by  the  individual  determination  of  king  Agrippa, 
we  would  have  to  eliminate  his  case  from  those  instances 
adduced  for  our  leading  argument,  viz  ,  that  the  statute  of 
Numbers  xv.  was  the  Mosaic  legal  enactment,  upon  which 
the  Synhedrin  based  their  title  of  criminally  prosecuting 
antinomian  Jewish  Christians.  While  this  would  in  no 
way  invalidate  it,  we  would  yet  prefer,  if  possible,  to  range 
James,  the  apostle's,  cause  with  the  others  discussed  before. 
We  venture  indeed  to  attempt  it,  the  foregoing  contrary 
points  notwithstanding.  Agrippa,  we  propose,  may  nor 
have  proceeded  against  him  exclusively  from  political  con- 
siderations. Nor  is  it  unlikely  that  he  had  at  least  some 
Synhedrial  coadjutors  in  bringing  him  to  justice.  The  action 
against  him  may,  then,  have  pirtly  at  least  borne  an 
authoritatively  judicial  character.  And  the  provocation  to 
it,  too,  may  partly  have  lain  in  what  was  construed  as 
blasphemy,  alike  anti-monotheistic  and  antinomian,  in  the 
manner  explained  above. 

That  Agrippa's  action  may  not  have  been  entirely  politi- 
cal, but  caused  by  religious  motives  as  well,  might  be 
assumed  from  the  extent  of  his  persecution  of  Christians. 
For  not  only  the  apostle  James  suffered  it  at  his  hands,  but 
also  Peter  was  designed  by  hi  m  as  a  victim.  In  view,  then,  of 
his  severe  attempts  on  more  than  one  leading  personage  of 
the  new  Christian  sect,  the  supposition  will  not  appear  too 
remote,  that  the  charge  of  religious  delinquency  was 
strongly  co-active  in  the  cause  of  James,  the  apostle,  too. 
(  Baur's  remark,  that  Peter's  unexpected  release  was  per- 
haps due  to  Agrippa's  notice,  that  his  execution  of  the 
apostle  James  was  after  all  not  so  popular  as  he  imagined, 
is  as  noteworthy  as  it  is  acceptable.  Here  we  hold  it  per- 
tinent to  produce  yet  the  important  opinion  of  the  critics 
Schneckenburger.  Zell^r,  ana  Baur,  that  Agrippa's  perse- 
cution of  the  Jewish  Christians  towards  the  end  of  his 
reign  was  the  first  of  its  kind  since  the  death  of  Jesus,  the 
previous  one,  started  with  Stephen,  not  having  affected  an}- 
other  than  Hellenistic  Christian  schismatics). 

To  resume  the  main  thread  of  our  argument,  we  contend 
that  the  statute  of  Numbers  in  question  was  well  fitted  to 
be  used  as  authority  for  penal  proceedings  against  anti- 
nomian offenders  As  such  were  surely  considered  the 
Essenes    with    their    opposition    to  sacrifice,    and   also    the 


268  THE    SABBATH    IiN    HISTORY. 

Jewish  Christians  sharing  this  opposition.  That  the  Syn- 
hedrin  will,  in  order  to  deal  rigidly  with  such  "  despisers  of 
the  ^vord  of  God  " — and  as  well  with  other  defiant  assaulters 
of  the  Law  or  parts  of  it — have  resorted  to  that  statute,  is, 
while  not  directly  provable,  most  probable  at  least.  We 
hold  that  it  was  brought  to  bear  and  put  in  practice  in  the 
several  prosecutions  of  Jewish  Christians,  from  Jesus  to 
James  the  Just. 

The  objection  that  no  record  of  the  judicial  executiorv 
of  that  statute  against  criminally  arraigned  antinomian 
Christians  is  extant,  cannot  count  for  anything.  How  many 
reliable  accounts  of  the  real  judicial  practice  of  the  Syn- 
hedriii  since  the  time  of  Jesus  have  been  preserved  at  all  ?' 
What  do  we  know  for  sure  about  the  actual  method  of 
trials  and  course  of  proceedings  in  those  days  of  Sadducean 
supremacy  and  majority.''  As  to  the  relative  expositions 
and  traditions  delivered  to  us  through  the  later  Rabbinical 
literature,  we  may  lay  it  down  as  indisputable  that  they  are, 
in  the  main,  nothing  but  self-made  and  scholastically 
evolved  theories  on  points  of  judicial  law.  The  Sadducean 
Temple  nobility  with  the  president  of  the  council  from  their 
own  rank  and  party,  may,  for  all  we  know,  have  followed,  in 
the  prosecution  of  Christian  schismatics,  either  their  old,  at 
one  time  abolished,  but  possibly,  on  the  restitution  of  their 
power,  again  revived  "  code  of  decisions,"  or  devised  new 
rigid  measures  by  way  of  more  or  less  direct  derivations 
from  Mosaic  provisions  of  judicial  law.  They  may,  more- 
over, have  acted  very  arbitrarily  in  cases  of  antinomian 
inquisition — a  supposition  to  which  one  is  easily  led  by 
comparing  the  mode  of  execution  of  the  apostle  James 
(provided  the  Synhedrin  was  connected  with  the  infliction 
of  his  doom),  decapitation,  with  that  of  Stephen  and  James 
the  Just,  which  was  stoning.  That  the  later  Rabbinical 
rubrical  enumerations  of  points  of  criminal  law  were  for  the 
most,  or,  at  least,  a  large  part,  mere  theories,  which  cannot 
have  been  the  actual  standard  by  which  the  Synhedrin 
judged  when  in  power  in  the  first  century,  may  be  proved 
from  the  following. 

Jesus'  trial  and  condemnation  practically  took  place  on 
the  first  day  of  Passover.  So  the  Synoptics  report,  espe- 
cially Matthew,  concerning  which  Evangelist  we  quote 
Strauss'  view  (A  New  Life  of  Jesus,  ii.  3 14),  that  if  he  "did 
not  hesitate  to  assert  that  Jesus  was  condemned  and  cruci- 
fied on  the  first  day  of  Raster,  we  may  fairly  be  satisfied 
with  his  statement."  Now  it  was  well  known  that  there 
was  a  Rabbinical  canon,  that  no  trial  should  be  held  on  the 
Sabbath  or  any  holy   day   (  Mishnah,  Betsa,  f  36).     That 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  269 

Rabbi  Akiba  should  by  that  proposition  in  Tosifta  Synhe- 
drin  xi.  7,  "  and  they  bring  them  to  death  on  the  feast," 
have  intended  to  contradict  and  upset  that  canon,  is  a  most 
erroneous  opinion  of  some  writers.  It  is  maintained  by 
the  before-quoted  Strauss  (  1.  c.  p.  312).  Even  the  erudite 
Jewish  author,  Ur.  Joel,  fathers  and  elaborates  it  in  'Blicke, 
etc'  ii.  62  sq.  He  would  account  for  Akiba's  disregard  of 
the  established  rule,  by  what  he  alleges  as  his  acquaintance 
with  the  precedent  set  in  the  case  of  Jesus.  The  knowl- 
edge of  it,  he  affirms,  cam6  to  him  through  the  report  of 
the  Synoptics,  since  "the  evangelical  books  were  known  in 
this  (  Rabbinical  )  circle."  He  lets  Akiba  generah'ze  from 
this  single  precedent,  and  extend  the  permissibility,  nay 
the  obligation,  of  execution  on  the  holy  da\'  proper,  to  a 
number  of  delinquents. 

But  all  this  is  nothing  but  airy  sophistry,  wanting  every 
solid  support.  We  on  our  part  presume  to  vouch,  that 
Rabbi  Akiba  never  thought  of  countenancing  a  breach  of  a 
holy  day  proper  by  the  execution  of  a  criminal,  such  as  is 
imputed  to  him  by  reference  to  that  passage  in  the  Tosifta. 
Nor,  we  insist,  will  he  have  antagonized  the  established 
prohibition  of  holding  court  on  Sabbaths  and  holy  days 
(see  the  aforecited  Mishnah),  so  that  he  could,  as  Joel  pre- 
tends, be  supposed  to  have  found  and  declared  the  trial  and 
condemnation  of  Jesus  on  the  first  day  of  Passover  as  per- 
fectly in  order,  and  at  the  same  time  as  forming  a  prece- 
dent, justifiable  to  be  copied  in  subsequent  legislation. 
That  Akiba  should  have  had  such  a  divergent,  liberal  view 
is  utterly  impossible,  especially  in  regard  to  capital  cases, 
in  which  it  was  besides  prescribed,  to  have  two  recording 
clerks  for  \vriting  down  the  whole  proceedings  of  the  court 
(  B.  Synh.  f.  34  ).  That  no  ancient  Rabbi  can  be  conceived 
to  have  approved  writing  on  a  sacred  festival,  admits  of  no 
question  whatever.  To  harmonize  therefore  that  scholastic 
utterance  of  Akiba  in  the  Tosifta,  with  his  otherwise 
unquestionable  orthodox  position  on  all  points  of  Jewish 
law  and  custom,  we  have  to  explain  it  to  refer  not  to  the 
real  holy  day,  but  to  the  half-holy  days  of  Passover  and 
Tabernacles,  which  intervening  days  were  Rabbinically 
designated  "  regel,"  too.  As  to  the  Feast  of  Weeks,  it  is 
easy  to  suggest  that  Akiba,  if  he  included  this  festival  at 
all,  thought  of  the  six  days  following  it.  on  which  the  execu- 
tions enumerated  in  that  passage  might  take  place.  For 
these  six  days  which  together  with  the  Shabuoth  day  itself 
made  up  a  week,  were  for  ritual  objects  accounted  as 
appendages  to  this  festival  (  comp.  Moed  Katan,  iii.  6).    In 

lOJ 


270  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

the  case  of  the  execution  of  a  delinquent  set  for  the 
Shabuoth  season,  Akiba  may  accordingly  have  intended  to 
propose,  that  it  has  to  take  place  during  the  six  supple- 
mentary days  belonging  to  the  festival. 

Reverting  now  to  the  before-mentioned  point  that  Jesus' 
trial  occurred  on  the  first  day  of  Passover,  it  will  not  seem 
necessary  to  assert,  that  in  it  no  regard  was  had  to  the 
Rabbinical  rules  that  were,  in  the  manner  explained  before, 
to  be  affected  by  it.  Nor  is  it  likely  that  in  his  case  the 
other  Rabbinical  canon,  "no  condemnation  without  pre- 
vious warning,"  was  complied  with.  At  any  rate,  there  is 
no  mention  that  such  warning  was  given  him.  But  this 
was  positively  a  disregard  of  the  precept,  that  no  one  should 
be  executed  or  even  corporally  punished,  without  such  pre- 
vious warning.  It  was  a  most  weighty  one  with  the  Rabbis 
of  old.  The  clemency  of  the  Pharisees — on  it,  see  Mishnah 
Synhedrin,  f.  40,  and  B.  Maccoth  f.  7 — had  devised  all  sorts 
of  humane  pretexts  to  evade  the  carrying  out  of  the  stern 
letter  of  the  Mosaic  penal  law.  To  it  was  also  due  the 
institution  that  no  judicial  punishment  should  be  inflicted, 
without  that  a  proper  dehortation  .was  before  given  to  the 
delinquent.  We  are  yet  to  observe  that  possibly,  in  the 
■cause  of  Jesus,  even  the  Phariseic  doctors  did  not  deem  a 
■dehortation  necessary,  since  he  was  no  doubt  regarded  as 
a  Chaber,  "  an  instructed  person  "  (distinguished  from  the 
vulgar),  always  supposed  to  know  what  is  unlawful,  with- 
out any  expostulation  with  him  concerning  the  matter  in 
question  (see  on  this  B.  Maccoth  f.  9);  or  that,  if  the 
criminal  charge  laid  against  him  was  seduction,  the  ques- 
tion of  previous  warning  was  waived  even  by  these  doctors, 
because,  according  to  the  Talmud,  the  rule  had  prevailed 
that  to  a  'Mesith'  no  such  consideration  is,  for  the  eminent 
gravity  of  his  trespass,  to  be  accorded  (  see  B.  Synhedrin, 
f.  80).  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  to  be  noted  that  we  possess 
no  authentic  proof,  that  such  distinctions  had  already  been 
made  or  gained  legal  recognition  at  the  early  period  in 
which  Jesus  lived,  even  among  the  Phariseic  party. 

There  are  some  other  divergences  from  Rabbinism  that 
could  be  mentioned  as  striking  us  in  the  accounts  of  the 
proceedings  against  Jesus.  We  will  here  only  yet  point 
out  the  rule,  stated  in  the  Mishnah  Synh.  f.  32,  that  no 
decision  must  be  rendered  in  any  capital  case  on  the  same 
day  of  the  trial.  This  was  surely  not  kept  in  Jesus' 
trial. 

All  these  foregoing  remarks  tend  to  show  conclusively, 
that  to  judge  from  the  literarj'  discussions  and  decisions  on 
points  of  criminal  law  preserved  in  the  Talmud,  back  to  the 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  2/1 

real  practice  followed  by  the  Synhedrin  when  it  had  a 
Sadducean  majority,  as  was  the  case  in  the  first  Christian 
century  to  the  end  of  the  Jewish  State,  is  in  the  highest 
degree  unwarranted.  The  Sadducean  rulers  in  the  council 
were  either  not  aware  of,  or  paid  no  heed  to,  the  various 
theoretical  devices  for  evading  rigid  judgment,  which  the 
Phariseic  schools  had  brought  forward.  This  holds  good  as 
well  with  regard  to  the  incrimination  of  Jesus  as  of  the 
other  accused  Jewish  Christians. 

To  object  dogmatically,  therefore,  that,  because  the 
extant  codifications  of  judicial  law,  coming  as  they  do  from 
Rabbinical  doctors  of  a  later  age,  furnish  no  analogy  for 
certain  Synhedrial  proceedings,  that  may  yet,  on  the  other 
side,  be  set  down  with  perfect  propriety  as  prevailing  with 
those  Senates  composed  mostly  of  Sadducees,  is  unreason- 
able, indeed.  Our  proposition,  then,  that  Jesus,  Stephen, 
Paul,  and  the  two  James  were  incriminated  for  the  blas- 
phemy of  "despising  the  word  of  God,"  and  sentence  of 
death  was  passed  on  them  by  a  Sadducean  majority  of  the 
Synhedrin  in  accordance  with  the  statute  in  question  which 
treats  of  such  offence,  will  not  in  the  least  be  invalidated 
by  the  fact,  that  the  Rabbinical  rubrication  in  the  Mishnah 
does  not  contain  any  provision  of  judicial  punishment  for 
antinomian  blasphemy,  the  Rabbis  having  uniformly  inter- 
preted '  kareth  ' — the  penalty  denounced  in  that  statute  — 
as  to  be  inflicted  by  God  and  not  by  any  temporal  power. 
Who,  we  have  to  ask,  can  bring  forth  any  evidence  that  the 
Sadducean  judges,  in  their  lofty  and  stern  conception  of 
the  Synhedrin  being  the  substitutes  of  the  Deity  for  carry- 
ing out  his  Law,  did  not  presume  to  act  as  its  competent 
avengers  themselves,  and  decree  and  execute  with  their 
own  hands  the  "  extermination,"  which  was  the  Mosaic, 
and,  consequently,  Divine,  judicial  verdict  enunciated  for 
antinomian  heresy  ?  And  this  in  especial,  since,  as  already 
observed  before,  they  might  refer  for  a  warrant  to  the 
enactment  of  Leviticus  xxiv.  i6,  appointing  death  by  ston- 
ing as  the  penalty  for  the  crime  of  the  same  denomina- 
tion ? 

It  may  here  be  added  that  not  only  can  we  not  reliably 
conclude  from  judicial  ordinances  laid  down  in  the  Mish- 
nah, back  to  the  actual  norm  of  procedure  maintained  by 
a  previous,  largely  Sadducean  Synhedrin,  we  must  even  not 
be  too  positive  in  our  inferences  from  them  to  the  course 
followed  by  former  Phariseic  Synhedrists  themselves,  in 
those  days,  namely,  when  they  happened  to  be  in  the 
majority,  or  only  in  a  strong,  determining  minority.  We 
will    adduce  only  one  out  of  several  instances  to  demon- 


272  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

strate  the  incongruity  of  later  Rabbinical  theory  with  ear- 
lier Phariseic  practice.  In  the  Mishnah,  Synh.  vi.  4.  it  is 
directly  asserted  that  Simeon  ben  Shetach,  who  as  presi- 
dent of  the  Synhednn  had  eighty  witches  hanged  on  one 
day  in  Askalon,  acted  against  the  established  custom  of 
trying  only  one  criminal  case  a  day.  He  differed,  too, 
from  the  view  held  by  the  "  wise  doctors  "  mentioned  in 
that  Mishnah,  who  maintained  that  women  should  not  be 
hanged  at  all.  We  may  state  in  addition,  that  he  dissented 
from  the  later  Rabbis  also  in  this  respect,  that  he  put  those 
witches  to  death  by  hanging,  while  the  Mishnah  at  least 
had  recognized  stoning  as  the  mode  of  execution  of  witches 
( Synh.  vii.  4).  When  we  find  such  practical  divergences 
of  older  Phariseic  courts  of  justice  from  later  Phariseic-Rab- 
binical  judicial  institutions  as  embodied  in  the  code  of  the 
Mishnah,  how  can  we  use  the  latter  as  authority  for  ascer- 
taining the  crirrinal  practice  of  the  Sadducees  in  the  days 
when  they  were  in  power  .''  It  is  an  indisputable  fact  that 
we  know  very  little  about  the  criminal  justice  of  this  sect. 
It  is  well-nigh  enveloped  in  obscurity.  To  resort,  then,  to 
later  Rabbinical  theories  as  proofs  for  settled  judicial 
norms  prevailing  in  the  Jerusalemite  Synhedrin  of  anterior 
times,  must  seem  impertinent  to  the  inquirer  after  true 
historical  facts. 

To  convince  the  reader  that  we  are  not  alone  in  holding 
such  view,  we  will  mention  Weiss'  relative  discussion  in 
his  "Dor  Dor,  etc.,"  i.  p.  151.  He  declares  it  evident  from 
diverse  instances,  that  the  legal  concepts  and  canons  of 
Rabbis  of  the  post-Synhedrial  times  can  by  no  means  be 
set  down  as  representing  those  of  the  anterior  Synhedrin, 
when  the  senate  was  invested  with  real  jurisdiction  and 
punitive  authority.  He  refers  there  to  the  trial  of  Herod 
for  the  slaying  of  Hezekiah  (see  Jos.  Ant.  xiv.  9,  4).  Surely, 
he  argues,  there  were  not  observed  in  this  case  the  Rab- 
binically  delivered  judicial  rules,  that  a  delinquent  must  be 
forewarned  by  the  two  accusing  witnesses,  and  he  himself 
must  verbally  admit  to  them  his  knowledge  of  the  liability 
to  death  for  the  particular  crime  against  which  he  was 
warned,  else  the  penalty  of  death  cannot  be  carried  out 
against  him.  For,  he  asks,  how  can  it  be  supposed  that 
there  were  then  two  men  found  in  the  whole  of  Galilee, 
who  had  courage  enough  to  stand  up  and  give  evidence 
against  the  powerful  tetrarch  of  this  province  .-' 

As  another  instance  of  the  incongruity  of  later  Rabbini- 
cal judicial  theories  with  the  practice  of  the  former  Syn- 
hedrin, Weiss  quotes  a  case  of  execution  by  burning  to 
death  of  an  adulteress  from  a  priestly  family  (by  the  enact- 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  2/3 

ment  of  Lev.  xxi.  9).  attested  as  an  actual  occurrence  by  a 
Rabbi  of  the  earlier  period, — the  latter  part  of  the  first  cen- 
tury C.  E.  The  way  in  which  this  doctor  reports  the 
execution  to  have  been  managed,  conflicts  with  that  theo- 
retically adopted  by  the  other  Rabbis,  and  which  is  indeed 
laid  down  as  the  norm  in  the  Mishnah  (see  B.  Synh.  f.  52 
and   53). 

With  this  author's  congenial  view  we  will  close  this  dis- 
sertation, hoping  that  its  leading  idea  of  the  practical 
application  by  the  Synhedrin  of  the  statute  of  Numbers 
XV.  30,  31,  in  cases  of  antinomian  heresy,  will  meet  if  not 
with  the  unqualified  assent,  at  least  with  the  appreciation 
of  the  thinking,  critical  reader. 

^•^  Even  Keim,  who  strains  himself  to  the  utmost  to  rep- 
resent Jesus'  position  in  reference  to  the  La^v  half-conserva- 
tively,  concedes  that  "the  moral  precepts  dominate  in  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount,  even  in  Matt.  v.  33,  37,  just  as  they 
do  in  the  controversy  ib.  xv.  3  sq..  and  in  the  speech  to  the 
young  man,  ib.  xix.  17;  comp.  also  ib.  xxii.  34  sq."  We 
agree  with  him  on  the  domination  of  the  moral  precepts,  but 
have  to  assert  it  as  being  exclusive  of  all  ceremonial 
laws.  This  he  himself  almost  directly  admits  towards 
the  end  of  his  work,  in  vol.  vi.  p.  401,  where  he  says  : 
■"The  Law  .  .  .  had  long  lain  on  the  ground  as  breaches 
made  by  his  prowess.  This  he  has  accomplished  by  laying 
stress  merely  on  the  moral  truths  of  the  Law  and  disposing 
of  the  Old  Testament  like  one  who  has  authority." 

^°A  considerable  number  of  celebrated  critics,  quoted  by 
Keim,  1.  c.  iii.  322,  regard  these  two  verses  as  a  later  Jewish 
Christian,  anti-Pauline  interpolation. 

^^  This  estimation  occurs  also  in  Ecclesiasticus,  xxix,  ii, 
12,  only  that  no  reference  is  there  made  to  the  future  world. 

^^  It  is  true,  Jesus  gave  the  cry  of  repentance,  at  times  at 
least,  the  turn,  not  of  actual  sorrow  for  real  religious  and 
moral  delinquencies,  but  of  a  change  of  mind  from  being 
insusceptible  to  the  belief  in  his  Messiahdom,  to  espousing 
his  cause  with  that  reliance  which  he  gave  out  to  be  so  fully 
justified  by  his  miraculous  works.  In  the  same  sense  he 
even  uttered  his  reproach  against  the  disbelievers  in  John 
the  Baptist ;  see  Matt.  xxi.  32.  Yet  for  all  this  we  see  that 
he  invariably  made  use  at  least  of  the  term  repentance  as 
the  nominal  subject  of  his  utterances.  By  so  doing  he  but 
entered  upon  the  commonly  prevailing  notion,  that  the 
realization  of  the  Messianic  hopes  depended  on  it. 

^^That  Jesus  should  not  have  held  an  absolute  end  of 
heaven  and  earth  in  the  times  of  Messiah,  as  Keim  1.  c.  iii, 
p.  301  contends,  we  can  not  approve.     M  itthew  xxiv.  3,  35, 


274  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

are  too  decided  evidences  to  the  contrary.  Furthermore, 
Jewish  tradition  had  too  confidently  derived  this  view  and 
belief  from  Isa.  Ixv.  17  and  Ixvi.  22,  and  also  the  Christianity 
after  Jesus  had  too  firmly  grasped  it  (see  Rev.  xxi.  i;  2  Peter 
iii.  13),  to  suppose  that  he  regained  strange  to  or  discounten- 
anced it.  The  less  so  when  we  bear  in  mind,  that  the  second 
Isaiah  was  apparently  his  favorite  for  his  own  Messianic 
inquiries.  Alone  the  adoption  and  employment  of  the 
phrase  in  question  in  the  noted  passage  of  Matthew,  which 
recurs  again  ib.  xxiv.  35,  is  sufficient  evidence  that  he  was 
well  conversant  and  even  impregnated  with  the  popular 
Jewish  notion  of  the  destruction  and  recreation  of  the 
world  in  the  Messianic  period. 

^^We  would  conjecture  that  even  in  Matt.  xi.  13  the 
word  heos  "  until,"  is  a  false  Greek  translation  of  the  original.. 
This  particle  of  time  gives  an  intolerable  sense.  It  is  much 
rather  supposable  that  the  original  had  the  Hebrew  or 
Chaldaic  preposition  "le"  attached  to  the  name  of  John,  or 
to  yemoth  "times,"'  in  connection  with  this  name.  As  an 
example  corresponding  to  the  original  reading  we  here 
suggested,  may  serve  the  Talmudical  sentence,  kol 
hannebhiim  lo  nisnabbeu  ela  limoth  hammashiach,  "  all  the 
prophets  prophesied  only  for  the  times  of  Messiah"  ( B. 
Synh.  {.  99).  The  particle  "le"  in  such  a  construction 
denotes  "for"  or  "toward."  The  Greek  translator,  we 
surmise,  misunderstood  this  particle,  and  rendered  it  with 
'heos.'  That  by  substituting  le,  "for,"  the  context  gains  a 
much  better  sense,  is  clear.  Jesus  wished,  then,  to  convey- 
that  the  olden  prophets  pointed  to  the  period  of  John, 
whom  he  introduces  in  the  following  verse  14,  as  Elijah 
revived.  He  may  accordingly  have  referred  in  mind,  in  vv. 
13,  14,  to  Malachi  iii.  23. 

"^^The  gospel  accounts  of  controversies  held  by  Jesus 
with  Scribes  and  Pharisees  are  on  the  whole  very  suspicious. 
While  occasional  collisions  and  altercations  with  some  pious 
sages  of  the  Jewish  people  have  doubtless  occurred,  we 
cannot  accept  as  authentic  the  representation  of  a  syste- 
matic conflict  with  them,  such  as  the  gospels  put  forth. 

As  worse  than  suspicious,  even  as  ludicrous,  we  must 
declare  the  report  of  a  commission  of  Scribes  and  Pharisees 
being  purposely  deputed  by  the  Jerusalemite  authorities  to> 
the  Galilean  abode  of  Jesus,  to  inquire  into  the  cause,  why 
'*  his  disciples  neglected  the  tradition  of  the  elders  "  in  not 
washing  their  hands  before  meals  (Matt.  xv. ). 

Not  wishing  to  argue  here  on  the  production  by  the  later 
and  less  reliable  Luke  and  Mark  of  Jerusalemite  doctors  or* 
the  scene  of  Jesus'  Galilean  ministry,  in  instances  in  which 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  275: 

Matthew  mentions  nnerely  Pharisees  and  Scribes  (comp. 
Mark  iii.  22  with  Matt.  xii.  24;  and  especially  Luke's 
"Pharisees  and  doctors  of  the  Law  fronn  all  Galilee,  Judaea 
and  Jerusalem."  v.  17.  [see  on  the  latter  also  Keim,  1.  c.  iii. 
215]  with  "certain  of  the  Scribes"  in  the  corresponding: 
account  of  Matthew  ix.  3),  we  will  confine  ourselves  to  a- 
reflection  on  the  above  relation  of  Matthew. 
•  Is  it  conceivable,  we  ask,  that  an  authoritative  embassy 
of  Scribes  and  Pharisees  came  all  the  way  from  Jerusalem — 
it  was  at  least  a  three  days' journey  ;  see  Josephus,  Life, 
sect.  52 — to  investigate  Jesus'  attitude  regarding  one 
Phariseic-Rabbinical  custom,  the  washing  of  hands  before 
meals  .'* 

Had  the  commission  been  fur  a  general  investigation  of 
his  public  activity'  and  teachings,  we  might  credit  it. 
Especially  if,  as  Keim  proposes,  it  took  place  towards  the 
close  of  the  Galilean  activity,  and  previously  to  his  journey- 
to  Jerusalem,  late  in  the  autumn  of  34  C.  E.  At  this  junc- 
ture many  grave  objects  calling  for  a  serious  inquisition 
ha'd  accumulated  against  him.  But  that  the  authorities  of 
Jerusalem  should  have  held  it  important  enough  to  dispatch 
an  embassy  of  inquisitors  to  Galilee  for  the  apostles'  omis- 
sion of  hand-washing,  which  was  merely  a  late  Phariseic- 
Rabbinical  observance,  is  for  us  impossible  to  believe.  We 
have,  despite  Keim's  unquestioned  acceptance  of  it  as 
"certainly  and  manifoldly  attested"  (1.  c.  iv.  p.  17),  to 
reject  it  as  most  inauthentic. 

The  more  so  when  we  hold  in  view,  that  in  Jesus'  time 
the  rite  of  hand-washing  before  eating  can  hardly  have  been^ 
commonly  adopted  by  the  Jewish  people,  so  that  its  neglect 
by  Jesus'  disciples  might  be  reproved  by  the  Rabbinical 
authorities  as  a  religious  dereliction.  There  is  a  well 
warranted  relation  preserved  in  the  Talmuds  (  B.  Sabb.  f. 
14  ;  Jer.  Sabb.  f.  3).  that  Hillel  and  Shammai,  the  scholarchs- 
of  Jerusalem  in  Herod's  time,  established  the  rule  that 
priests  should  have  to  wash  their  hands  before  eating  their 
consecrated  food,  the  Terumah,  even  if  they  were  not  con- 
scious of  being  defiled  by  any  contact  with  unclean  things. 
It  was  one  of  the  many  preventive  restrictions,  peculiar  to 
the  punctil'ous  Phariseic  Rabbinism,  that  laid  such  superior 
stress  on  Levitical  purity.  That  it  must  needs  have  taken 
some  time  before  this  rule  of  the  scholarchs  could  gain  a 
fairly  wide  acceptance,  even  among  the  priests  of  the  Phari- 
seic sect,  may  safely  be  anticipated.  And  that  the  Sad- 
ducean  priests  who  were  doubtless  in  the  majority,  will 
not  have  allowed  themselves  to  be  dictated  to  on  that 
point  by  Rabbinical  authorities  whose  statutes  they  other- 


270  THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

wise,  on  the  whole,  discountenanced,  admits  of  no  question, 
either.  There  is  every  reason  to  assume  that,  after  it  had 
once  been  firmly  established,  some  austere  casuists  in  the 
schools  of  Jeiusalem — the  names  of  the  authors  are  not 
transmitted — proposed  that  the  same  restriction  which 
those  scholarchs  had  enacted  for  priests,  should  prevail 
with  lay  people  as  well.  They  too  should  observe  it  before 
eatingr  their  meats,  though  profane  and  not  really  requiring 
such  scrupulous  care. 

Whether  the  motive  for  this  later  ordinance  was  a  rever- 
ent regard  for  holy  things,  namely,  as  it  is  set  forth  in  B. 
Cholin  f.  io6,  to  inure  the  priests,  seeing  that  ablutions  were 
required  even  of  laymen  before  eating  their  profane  meats, 
to  be  the  more  exact  in  regard  to  the  rite  of  hand-washing 
for  their  consecrated  portion;  or  whether  it  was  urged  by 
a  mere  pious  rivalry  with  the  priests  and  the  intent  of 
observing  the  same  rule  of  purity  as  was  ordained  for  them, 
this  much  must  at  all  events  be  allowed  by  all,  that  it  can- 
not have  been  passed  long  before  Jesus'  activity,  if  at  all 
before  his  time.  For  the  view  we  advanced  above  on  the 
original  restriction,  that  from  the  theoretical  legislation  to 
the  general  practical  introduction  of  a  rite,  a  considerable 
time  must  elapse,  surely  holds  no  less  as  to  the  second. 
Accordingly  it  will  not  be  amiss  to  aver,  that  very  few  of 
the  Jewish  lay  people  knew  of  this  second  restriction,  which, 
by  the  way,  passes  in  the  Talmud  as  a  "  statute  of  the 
Wise"  (B.  Cholin  f.  io6).  The  custom  became,  it  is  true, 
general  at  a  later  tim.e.  But  at  the  period  of  Jesus  it  had 
positively  not  become  so  yet.  It  may  not  even  have  been 
enacted  anterior  to  or  even  during  Jesus'  lifetime,  so  that 
we  could  expect  it  to  have  then  been  observed  by  the 
Jewish  people  at  large. 

How,  then,  could  Jesus'  disciples  and  he  himself  have  been 
made  subjects  of  recrimination  for  its  neglect  ?  Further- 
more, if  the  hand-washing  before  common  meats  was,  as 
the  Talmud  suggests  (see  above),  instituted  for  habituating 
the  priests  to  greater  exactness  of  purity  with  their  own 
consecrated  meats,  it  is  even  possible  that  in  Galilee,  where 
there  were  no  priests  (see  Rashi  in  Nedarim  f.  i8),  the 
necessity  of  such  legislation  did  not  appear  at  all,  and  that 
consequently  the  rule  that  had  its  origin  in  Jerusalem, 
gained  no  acceptance  in  that  province,  in  Jesus'  or  at  any 
other  time.  And  if  the  Rabbis  and  other  pious  people  of 
Galilee  emulating  them,  did  not  know  anything  of  it,  or.  at 
any  rate,  saw  no  necessity  of  observing  it,  were,  we  ask.  the 
fishermen  and  other  unlearned  folks  who  formed  Jesus' 
narrower  and  wider  circles,  expected  to  know  and  heed  it  .'* 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  2// 

Again,  let  us  say.  if  at  a  discussion  in  a  later  Babylonian 
academy  the  authority  of  the  rite  of  hand-washing  for  com- 
mon meats  was  freely  questioned,  because  it  was  thought 
contradictory  to  the  original  Shammaic  and  Hillelic  ordi- 
nance which  was  expressly  passed  for  priests  only  (see  B. 
Chagigah  f.  i8;  comp.  also  Tosifta  Berachoth  vi.  3:  "en 
netilath  yadayim  lecholin  "),  is  it  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
any  one  in  Jesus'  time,  when  the  additional  Phariseic  restric- 
tion could  at  best  have  but  recently  been  introduced,  was 
authoritatively  called  to  account  for  omitting  it  ? 

It  is  true,  that  a  case  of  violent  inquisition  for  the  rejec- 
tion of  this  rite,  is  reported  in  the  Mishnah  as  having 
occurred  within  the  province  of  Judaism  itself.  A  Rabbi, 
Elazar  ben  Chanoch,  is  said  to  have  been  excommunicated, 
probably  by  Gamaliel  II.,  the  scholarch  of  Jamnia,  who  held 
this  office  from  about  80  to  120  C.  E.,  for  disputing  the 
obligation  of  hand-washing  before  profane  meats  (Aduyoth 
V.  6).  But  it  has  to  be  borne  in  mind  that  not  only  may 
such  excess,  due  to  the  vehement  temper  of  Gamaliel  and 
other  peculiar  circumstances  which  cannot  here  be  set  forth, 
have  been  the  only  one  perpetrated  within  the  old  Rab- 
binical jurisdiction  as  regards  that  rite,  but,  mainly,  that 
stern  measures  of  legal  interference  of  this  later  time  can- 
not be  held  out  as  an  indication,  that  the  same  severe 
procedure  or  even  only  verbal  reprobations  on  the  part  of 
the  religious  authorities,  were  entailed  by  the  opposition  to 
that  rite  at  the  much  earlier  period  in  which  Jesus  lived  and 
taught.  For  in  the  latter's  time  the  rite  can  at  best,  as 
^e  have  shown  above,  have  been  in  a  state  of  incipient 
acknowledgment  by  the  Jewish  people.  Persecution  for 
its  neglect  can  therefore  not  possibly  be  set  down  as  having 
occurred  so  early. 

We  admit  that  a  rigorous  enforcement  of  the  rite  was 
attempted  by  Phariseic-Rabbinical  authorities  at  the  more 
advanced  time  when  the  first  gospel  was  written.  The 
author  of  Matthew — he  wrote  according  to  Hausrath,  '  N.  T. 
Times,'  ii.  p.  106,  during  the  Jewish  war;  according  to 
Strauss,  'New  Life  of  Jesus,'  some  time  after  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  Temple — may  have  noticed  in  Jewish  society 
cases  of  inquisition  for  the  omission  of  that  rite.  Wishing 
to  add  another  point  of  collision  between  the  Master  and 
the  much  berated  Pharisees,  this  Evangelist  would  copy,  as 
may  be  supposed,  from  those  instances  which  he  witnessed 
in   his  own   time,  and  transfer  one  of  them  back  to  Jesus. 


278  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

To  antedate  one  of  those  occurrences  with  such  combina- 
tion, so  as  to  set  the  Pharisees  of  Jesus'  time  in  the  worst 
possible  light,  was  no  matter  of  conscience  with  that  gospel 
writer, 

^^  It  must  at  the  first  sight  certainly  appear  strange  that 
the  Pharisees  are  in  the  gospels  represented  as  being  such 
rigorous  Sabbatarians,  while  we  know  that  the  Sadducees 
and  Essenes  were  yet  stricter  in  the  Sabbath  observance. 
As  to  the  latter  it  is  attested  at  least  by  Josephus,  that  they 
were  more  punctilious  in  it  than  any  other  class  of  the  Jewish 
people  (Wars,  ii.  8,  9).  In  illustrating  their  Sabbath  rigor 
he  says  :  "  They  not  only  get  their  food  ready  the  day 
before,  that  they  may  not  have  (or,  be  tempted)  to  kindle 
a  fire  on  that  day,  etc."  If  this  account  means  anything  as 
peculiar  to  the  Essenic  sect, — for  surely  all  the  other  Jews 
would  consider  kindling  fire  on  the  Sabbath  as  grave  a 
violation  as  the  Essenes, — it  can  mean  only  that  with  them 
all  vessels  had  to  be  removed  from  the  heating  apparatus 
before  the  Sabbath,  and  were  not  permitted  to  be  left  there 
for  keeping  the  food  warm  during  the  day. 

In  this  respect  they  exceeded  indeed  the  Sabbath  scru- 
pulosity of  the  Pharisees.  For  these  were  indulgent 
enough  to  allow  for  the  comfort  of  having  warm  food  on 
the  Sabbath  day.  The  third  and  fourth  chapters  of  the 
Mishnah  of  the  Sabbath  treatise — if  we  may  conclude  back 
from  this  later  Rabbinical  compilation  to  the  custom  of  the 
Pharisees  in  Josephus'  time — show  their  mild  position  in 
that  regard.  Both  the  sterner  school  of  Shammai  and  the 
moderate  one  of  Hillel  appear  to  have  been  agreed,  that  it 
was  permissible  to  put  pots  with  eatables  on  cooking 
apparatus  before  the  beginning  of  the  Sabbath,  and  leave 
them  there  for  use  during  the  day,  as  long  as  there  was  no 
fear  that  one  might  be  tempted  to  rake  up  the  unconsumed 
fuel,  with  which  the  fire  was  made  and  kept  up  on  Friday. 
Likewise  were  evidently  all  the  Rabbinical  doctors  of  one 
mind  on  the  permissibility  of  keeping  food  warm  by  wrap- 
ping such  material  around  the  vessels  as  would  best  preserve 
the  heat  :  only  that  no  material  should  be  used  that  would 
increase  the  heat  by  the  process  of  condensation. 

It  is  thus  plainly  seen  that  the  Rabbis — and  they  were 
on  the  whole  identical  in  religious  views  and  practices  with 
the  learned  Pharisees  of  Josephus-  were  by  no  means  so 
extreme  in  the  Sabbath  observance  as  the  Essenes.  Their 
view  was,  that  the  day  should  be  distinguished  by  substan- 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  279 

tial  comfort.  The  day  should  not  be  one  of  mortification 
of  the  body,  but  of  serene  delight.  They  therefore  sought 
out  different  devices  by  which  comfort  and  delight  might 
be  attained  without  any  infringement  of  the  law. 

The  mystical  Essenes,  on  the  other  hand,  dissented  from 
such  view.  They  held  it  perhaps  an  impairment  of  their 
most  significant  'Hebdomad'  (compare  also  Philo's  fre- 
quent descanting  on  the  number  Seven  in  connection  with 
the  Sabbath  )  to  disturb  the  mind  on  the  Sabbath  by  the 
sensuous  occupation  of  looking  after  the  nourishment  of 
the  body,  and  providing  for  a  meal  that  would  become 
more  palatable  by  a  certain  suitable  temperature  and 
attendance.  Nor  were  the  Pharisees  so  extreme  as  these 
ascetics,  with  regard  to  handling  vessels  on  the  Sabbath. 
Josephus  attributes  to  them  that  "  they  dare  not  remove 
any  utensil  from  its  place"  (ib.).  That  the  historian  knew 
from  his  own  experience  and  observation  that  the  Pharisees 
were  not  so  strict  as  all  this,  is  already  clear  from  the  con- 
trast by  which  he  sets  forth  this  Essenic  restriction.  We 
certainly  do  not  know  exactly  how  the  Phariseic  authorities 
of  his  time  had  legislated  concerning  the  handling  and 
removal  of  utensils  on  the  Sabbath.  The  decided  relaxa- 
tion regarding  this  point  which  is  reported  in  B.  Sabbath  f. 
123,  as  having  been  suggested  by  the  Rabbis  of  the  second 
century  C.  E.  can,  for  the  continuous  variation  of  legisla- 
tion upon  it  which  is  mentioned  there,  not  be  taken  as  a 
standard  by  which  to  judge  of  the  respective  view  and 
practice  that  prevailed  among  the  Phariseic  doctors  of 
Josephus'  time.  Yet  thus  much  is  certain  that,  however 
strict  they  may  then  have  been  as  to  the  matter  in  ques- 
tion, their  severity  did  not  equal  the  Essenic  which 
Josephus  delivers.  We  may  take  it  for  granted  that  the 
Pharisees  would  never  countenance  such  restrictions  as 
could  accomplish  no  religious  ends,  at  the  same  time  when 
they  would  deprive  the  Israelite  of  the  feeling  of  serene 
delight  and  comfort,  which  was  to  be,  in  the  Phariseic-Rab- 
binical  mind,  the  concomitant  of  Sabbatic  rest. 

After  the  foregoing  citations  and  arguments,  the  query 
may  pertinently  be  put:  Why  are  the  Pharisees  so  promi- 
nently marked  out  in  the  gospels  as  austere  and  minute 
observers  of  the  Sabbath,  whereas  the  Essenes  had  notably 
a  much  stricter  view  of  its  law,  and  it  should  consequently 
be  expected  that  Jesus  collided  with  them  at  least  as  well 
on  questions  of  its  observance  ?  In  answer  to  it  we  would 
say,  that  the  Essenes,  being  a  retired,  contemplative  folk. 


:280                             THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  : 

i 

aimed   at   evading   every  polemical  encounter  as  much  as  j 

might   be,  even   in   cases  in   which  their  own  sense  of  the  | 

sanctity  of  life  was  provoked   by  any  contrary  conduct  of  i 

coreligionists  from  the  other  sects. 

As  to  Jesus  himself  who  was  without  any  doubt  partially  ' 
imbued  with  Essenism,  he  too  will,  we  can   readily  under- 
stand,  have  purposely  avoided  every    dogmatical   conflict  ' 
with  them.      Whether  or  not  his  points  of  doctrinal  contact  ; 
with  them  exceeded  those  of  contrast,  this  may  in  any  case 
be    asserted    with   confidence,   that    there   are    many   close  i 
doc'trinal  relations  with  them  discernible  in  the  essence  of  < 
his  teachings.     This  spiritual  accord,  though  only  partial,  1 
would    surely   prevail  on  him  to  eschew  every  dispute  with 
members  of  their  sect  on  any  subject  of  religious  practice.  ; 
This  accord,  too,  explains  easily  the  absence  of  reports  of  ' 
polemics  between   him  and  this  sect  on   questions  of  Sab-  i 
bath  observance,  concerning  which  he  differed   with  them 
so  essentially,  as  is  apparent  to  every  one  setting  off  his  : 
interpretation    of  it   against  the  most  rigorous  one  enter-  ] 
tained  by  them.  -■ 

The  congeniality  between  Essenism  and  primitive  Chris- 
tianity so  manifoldly  attested,  may  withal  be  regarded  as  ^ 
the  cause  why  no  disputations  have  come  down  to  us  as  ' 
having  occurred   between  one  another,  even  in  instances, 
such  as  slights  of  the  Sabbath,  which  called  for  sharp  rebuke 
by   such   strict   observers  as   the  Essenes  were.     It  is  this  i 
congeniality,  too,   that   goes  far  to  account  for  the  circum-  ; 
stance,  that   Essenic   sectaries  are   never  brought  into  the 
arena  by  the  Evangelists.    This  circumstance  must  inevita-  ; 
bly  attract  the  notice  of  every  thinking  person.   It  is  surely  i 
as  curious  as  it  is  significant.      To  us  it  signifies,  by  reason 
of  abundant  indications  to  support  our  notion,  the  congeni- 
ality of  the  body  of  the  pristine  Christians   with  that  sect.  ' 
There  is  indeed  nothing  that  might  explain  the  absence  of  i 
collisions  in  the  N.  T.  writings  between  both  classes  or  any 
allusions  to  the   Essenic  sect,  so  well   as  this  our   point  of  ; 
view. 

Here  it  seems  to  us  opportune  to  cite  the  respectij'e  inter- 
esting remarks  of  Bunsen,  "  The  Hidden  Wisdom,"  etc.:  ' 
"  The  mysterious  fact  that  the  Essenes  are  not  mentioned  j 
at  all  in  Scripture  is  best  explained  by  the  assumption,  I 
that  in  the  first  century  of  our  era  they  were  more  or  less  { 
identified  with  the  Christians." | 

As  to  the  Sadducees,  they  too   will,  from   the  following,  I 

appear  as  more  rigorous  in  regard  to  the  Sabbath  law  than  ' 

the  Pharisees.    Though  they  doubtless  disregarded  many,  if  : 
not  all,  Rabbinical  rules  of  Sabbatism  (Shebuth),  as  well  as, 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  28  F 

perhaps,  the  Rabbinical  division  of  Sabbath  labor  into  thirty- 
nine  chief  occupations  (aboth)  with  their  correlative  deriv- 
ates  (toledoth),  and  no  doubt  rejected  also  the  Rabbinical 
institution  of  the  imaginary  combinations  called  Erubh,  by 
which  artificial  devices  the  punctilious  Pharisees  claimed  to 
renew  the  Sabbath  limit  of  2,000  cubits  from  their  local 
terminus,  as  also  to  create  a  dispensation  for  carrying 
things  from  one  precinct  to  another  (see  on  this  Geiger, 
'Sadducees  and  Pharisees,'  p.  21),  we  are  yet  warranted  in 
declaring  them  stricter  in  guarding  the  Mosaic  Sabbath  law 
from  violation  than  the  Pharisees  were.  Their  standpoint 
was  the  direct  Mosaic  one,  as  it  resulted  from  the  literal 
sense  of  the  respective  commands.  They  rejected  as  not 
obligatory  all  the  traditional  accretions  of  Phariseism, 
existing  in  the  form  of  new  observances  or  preventive  regu- 
lations. They  were  e.  g.  opposed  to  the  Temple  rites,  on 
the  feast  of  Tabernacles,  of  "libation  of  water"  (nissuch 
hammayim),  and  the  circuits  made  round  the  altar  of  burnt- 
offerings  with  willow  branches,  which  were  shaken  in  the 
hands  of  the  bearers  (wherefor  the  rite  was  called  "  chibbut 
arabhah;"  see  Graetz,  Monatsschrift,  Nov.  1887),  and  put  up 
at  the  sides  of  the  altar  after  the  circuits  were  over. 

In  their  stiff  literalism  they  would  accept  no  Phariseic 
addition  to  the  written  ritual.  This  alone  had  obligatory 
authority  with  them.  Consequently  they  repudiated  also 
those  two  rites,  neither  of  which  was  prescribed  in  the 
Torah.  They  would  though,  as  a  rule,  not  omit  them  when 
they  were  officiating  themselves  as  Temple  functionaries. 
For  they  had  to  fear  the  indignation  of  the  masses  of  the 
people  who  were  Pharisaic  in  religious  belief  and  usage,  if 
they  designedly  left  them  off.  Yet  their  theoretical  oppo- 
sition to  them  they  never  concealed.  And  occasionally  it 
may  have  happened,  as  we  have  an  account  at  least  of  one 
ostensible  slight  committed  with  the  water-libation  (see  B. 
Sukkah  f.  48 ',  that  they  gave  it  even  a  practical  expression. 

Their  protest  against  the  use  of  willow  branches  in  the 
Temple  on  the  feast  of  Tabernacles  they  exhibited  spe- 
cially by  contending,  that  the  rite  must  by  no  means  take 
place  on  a  Sabbath  on  which  any  one  day  of  the  feast  might 
fall.  Not  even  on  the  seventh,  on  which  the  solemnity 
reached  its  height  by  the  discharge  of  seven  circuits,  should 
it  be  allowed  (see  B.  Sukkah  f.  43).  The  grounds  on  which 
they  based  their  view  were  supposably  no  other  than  that 
the  handling  of  willow  branches  was  unlawful  on  the  Sab- 
bath, because  they  were  an  article  set  apart  for  use  on 
working  days  only  ("muktse,"  according  to  the  Rabbinical 
terminology,    which    restriction    they    apparently    held    ia 


282  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

common  with  the  Rabbis).  This  shows  certainly  a  much 
keener  apprehension  of  the  Sabbath  restraint  than  the 
Pharisees  had.  To  these  the  "  chibbut  arabhah  "  ranked  as 
high  as  any  other  of  the  Temple  rites,  before  which  the 
Sabbath  law  had  to  give  way.  They  regarded  it,  we  sup- 
pose, as  an  act  "needful  for  the  service  of  God"  (tsorech 
Gaboah),  and  to  be  therefore  performed  on  the  Sabbath, 
like  the  entire  sacrificial  ritual  of  the  holocausts  ordained 
in  the  Pentateuch  for  this  day  (Numb,  xxviii.  9.  10). 

The  Sadducees,  on  the  other  hand,  distinguished  between 
those  Temple  rites  prescribed  in  the  Law  for  the  Sabbath, 
and  others  that  were  only  traditional.  To  the  former  were 
counted  the  perpetual  holocausts  of  the  morning  and  even- 
ing, together  with  two  additional  ones  for  the  morning 
(Numb.  I.e.);  the  incense  offering,  directly  ordered  for 
every  day,  and  certainly  inclusive  of  the  Sabbath  (  Ex.  xxx. 
7,  8  );  and  the  attendance  on  the  lights  of  the  candlestick, 
also  distinctly  understood  from  Exodus  1.  c.  as  obligatory 
on  every  day.  It  was  to  the  Sadducees  self-evident  that 
all  the  labors  required  for  those  parts  of  the  ritual — and 
there  was,  indeed,  a  considerable  number  of  manual  opera- 
tions otherwise  prohibited  on  the  Sabbath  connected  with 
the  victims  of  the  morning  and  evening — should  be  done  on 
the  Sabbath,  because  they  were  integrant  parts  of  the 
Divinely  instituted  worship.  The  traditional  rites,  however, 
could  with  this  sect  not  avail  to  make  the  Sabbath  law 
recede  before  them.  The  same -principle  upon  which  they 
opposed  those  rites  in  general,  namely,  that  God  has  not 
ordained  them  in  his  written  Law  so  as  to  be  obligatory 
on  the  Israelites,  was,  we  suppose,  applied  in  their  refusal 
to  permit  their  execution  on  the  Sabbath,  if  this  implied  a 
breach  of  its  law. 

We  hold  it  even  uncertain  whether  the\'  allowed  circum- 
cision, or  the  Passover  ritual,  on  the  Sabbath.  For  though 
these  were  most  prominent  Mosaic  institutions,  there  was 
yet  no  provision  in  the  Law  that  they  should  take  place 
also  on  the  Sabbath.  This  becomes  the  more  probable 
when  we  compare  the  Karaite  inhibition  of  the  same  rites 
on  the  Sabbath  (  see  Fuerst,  '  Histor}'  of  Karaism,'  i.  p. 
132).  The  Karaites  were  the  doctrinal  kin  of  the  Sad- 
ducees. And  though  we  may  not  be  perfectly  warranted 
to  conclude  from  those  later  Mosaic  literalists  to  the  earlier 
literal  legalists,  the  Sadducees,  with  regard  to  every  custom 
and  doctrine,  there  is  yet  all  likelihood  that  the  Karaites 
had  a  tradition  from  their  doctrinal  parents  on  the.  two 
before-mentioned  points  of  religious  usage. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  283 

Let  US  adduce  another  instance  illustrative  of  the  Sab- 
batic rig-or  of  the  Sadducees.  They  were  evidently  empha- 
tically opposed  to  the  Phariseic  custom  of  cutting  the  first- 
ling-sheaf on  the  eve  of  the  Sabbath,  as  it  was  invariably 
customary  with  the  Pharisees,  it  the  second  day  of  Pass- 
over— the  Omer-day — fell  or.  the  Sabbath.  According  to 
the  Sadducean  interpretation  of  the  relative  Mosaic  text  the 
sheaf-ceremony  had  al\va3's  to  take  place  on  the  day  after 
the  weekly  Sabbath,  as  likewise  the  feast  of  Weeks  had 
always  to  be  on  a  Sunday.  Accordingly,  their  time  of  cut- 
ting th(^  ceremonial  sheaf  never  clashed  with  the  Sabbath 
observance.  It  was  always  at  the  close  of  the  weekly  Sab- 
bath. The  Pharisees,  however,  holding  fast  to  their  inter- 
pretation of  the  Scripture  text  by  which  the  day  for  offer- 
ing the  sheaf  was  the  second  day  of  Passover,  on  whatever 
week-day  this  might  fall,  absolutely  allowed  its  cutting 
even  on  the  Sabbath  eve,  if  that  day  of  the  feast  began  with 
it.  The  man  appointed  for  reaping  the  ceremonial  sheaf 
had  to  call  out  demonstratively  three  times,  "on  this  Sab- 
bath ?'\  if  the  second  day  of  the  feast  happened  to  fall  that 
way.  This  was  done  in  a  spirit  of  polemics  and  refutation 
aimed  at  the  Sadducees,  who  insisted  on  Sunday  being  the 
invariable,    lawful    sheaf-day  (  Mishnah,    in    B.   Menachoth 

From  the  challenging  phrase  "on  this  Sabbath.?'  we 
infer  that  there  were  constant  carpings  between  the  two 
sects  as  to  the  permissibility  of  cutting  the  sheaf  on  the 
Sabbath.  The  Sadducees,  we  suppose,  decidedly  declared 
it  a  sinful  labor  and  a  needless  profanation  of  the  day, 
since  the  Torah  does  not  order  it  done  immediately  on  the 
night  previous  to  the  oblation,  were  it  even  that  the 
Scripture  text  admitted  of  the  Phariseic  perception. 

We  readily  concede  that  in  this  case  there  was  a  great 
deal  of  sectarian  animosity  mixed  up  with  the  stern  rever- 
ence for  the  Sabbath.  Yet  the  opposition  which  the 
Sadducees  made,  bore  at  least  the  outward  aspect  of  such 
reverence.  Moreover,  it  certainly  appears  from  all  the 
other  foregoing  propositions  that  they  had  a  very  austere 
perception  of  the  Mosaic  prohibition  of  labor,  surpassing, 
as  to  the  letter  of  the  Law  at  least,  that  of  their  antagonists, 
the  Pharisees. 

Why  then  are  the>'  not  even  once  mentioned  and  held  up 
as  Sabbatic  extremists  in  the  N.  T.  writings,  the  same  as 
the  Pharisees,  with  whom  Jesus  or  his  apostles  collided  ? 
We  can  account  for  it  only  by  the  circumstance,  that  the 
Sadducees  were  the   Temple   party   whose  intercourse  with 


284  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

the  populace  was  very  rare.  Jesus  and  his  followers  sup- 
posably  met  very  seldom  with  any  of  that  aristocratic  class. 
Whereas  the  learned  Pharisees  were  scattered  all  over  the 
land.  Their  precepts  were  followed  by  the  unlearned  bulk 
of  the  Jewish  people,  though  in  some  instances  not  com- 
pletely in  accordance  with  the  standard  of  exactness  to 
which  they  had  raised  them  for  tiiemselves.  The  gener- 
ality of  the  Jewish  people  were  especially  strict  in  the 
observance  of  the  Sabbath.  As  it  is  once  remarked  in  the 
Talmud  :  "While  Israel — the  am  ha-arets  "common  peo- 
ple"— are  to  be  suspected  in  matters  pertaining  to  the 
observance  of  the  Sabbatic  year,  they  are  irreproachable  as 
to  the  proper  heeding  of  the  Sabbath  restraints."  The 
laymen  did,  then,  not  lag  behind  the  learned  in  Sabbatic 
strictness.  Phariseic  or  Phariseically  trained  and  habit- 
uated Sabbath  observers,  Jesus  will  consequently  have 
encountered  in  every  town  or  village  of  his  own  native  dis- 
trict, too.  And  it  was  such  who  would  unremittingly 
resent  any  open  breach  of  the  Sabbath  law,  whether  the 
written  or  the  traditional.  Of  the  Sadducean  party,  how- 
ever, he  may  never  have  met  one  during  his  Galilean 
activity.  The  passage  in  Matt.  xvi.  i,  12,  naming  Sadducees 
together  with  Pharisees,  we  have  to  declare  as  inauthentic. 
This  does  indeed  not  imply  that  Jesus  must,  whilst  he  lived 
in  Galilee,  have  been  unacquainted  with  the  doctrines  pro- 
fessed and  the  position  occupied  by  the  Sadducees.  No, 
indeed.  We  have  on  the  contrary  every  reason  to  suppose 
that  he  learned  about  them  at  his  previous  stay  at  the 
Jordan,  with  John  the  Baptist  ;  see  them  mentioned  in  con- 
nection with  the  latter.  Matt.  iii.  7.  Yet  personal  disputes 
with  representatives  of  that  sect  he  cannot  be  thought  to 
have  had  till  the  latter  part  of  his  public  career,  when  he 
entered  the  province  of  Judea  and  the  city  of  Jerusalem. 
Even  here  he  seems  to  have  had  but  one  doctrinal  contro- 
versy with  them.  It  was  that  about  the  resurrection,  which 
the  Sadducees  denied  (Matt.  xxii.  23  ?q.).  This  controversy 
was  probably  started  by  them,  as  Geiger  has  rather  ingen- 
iously suggested  (Judaism  and  its  History,  I.  p.  118), 
because  "he  had  emphasized  the  resurrection  so  decidedly 
by  asserting  the  imminence  of  the  future  world,  the  kingdom 
of  Heaven."  Let  us  observe  here  in  passing,  that  this  is 
not  at  all  an  unlikely  motive  for  the  Sadducean  opposition 
to  him,  though  it  was  by  no  means  the  only  one.  It  may 
even  be  that  the  persecution  of  other  early  Jesus-believers 
was  partly  owing  to  the  latent  rancor  which  the  Sad- 
ducean  sect  cherished  against  them,  for  openly  and   con- 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORV.  28$ 

tinuously  putting  forth  not  only  the  resurrection  of  their 
Master,  but  the  earnest  and  eager  expectation  of  his  second 
coming,  at  which  period  the  general  Messianic  resurrec- 
tion would  occur. 

On  this  occasion  of  discussing  the  Sabbatic  standpoint 
of  the  Sadducees,  it  will  be  pertinent  to  annex  some 
information  on  the  Sabbath  observance  of  the  Dositheans, 
a  Samaritan  sect.  It  is  known  that  the  Sadducees  and 
Samaritans  had  some  sectarian  doctrines  in  common.  Both 
denied  resurrection.  With  regard  to  the  Pentateuch  it  is  to 
be  noted,  that  the  former  repudiated  all  traditional  observ- 
ances and  statutes,  attributing  obligation  but  to  those  of 
the  written  Law.  [  See  Josephus,  Ant.  xiii.  lo,  6; 
i6,  2,  and  compare  Geiger's  partially  adverse  stand- 
point in  "Urschrift,  etc."  p.  133  sq.  Their  maxim  was^ 
for  all  we  can  gather  from  the  envious  Rabbinical  sources^ 
that  a  doctrine,  rite,  or  statute  must  be  Mosaical  ("  mii> 
hattorah,"  or  contained  "battorah").  if  recognition  and 
obligation  are  to  be  claimed  for  it.  Their  agreement  with 
the  Pharisees  on  some  points  of  Mosaic  textual  expositions 
does  not  affect  the  accuracy  of  Josephus' assertion].  The 
Samaritans  had  a  similar  position  in  reference  to  the  Penta- 
teuch. They  recognized  it  only  as  sacred  Scripture,  reject- 
ing all  the  other  books  of  the  Jewish  canon  as  not  having 
this  character.  In  view  of  this  doctrinal  kinship  between 
the  Sadducees  and  the  Samaritans,  it  will  certainly  seem 
appropriate  to  mark  in  this  place  the  perception  of  the 
Sabbath  law  by  a  sect  belonging  to  the  latter  nationality. 
Dositheus,  a  Samaritan  reformer, — represented  by  Origen, 
'Against  Celsus,'  as  a  Messiah-pretender  of  the  apostolic 
age,  previous  to  Simon  the  Magician,  but  in  the  Clementine 
Homilies  and  the  Apostolic  Constitutions,  as  a  false  apostle„ 
contemporary  with  Simon, — is  by  the  first-named  writer,. 
in  his  other  treatise,  *  On  the  Principles'  (cited  by  Hilgen- 
feld,  1.  c.  p  157),  reported  to  have  interpreted  the  injunction 
of  Exodus  xvi.  29,  "  abide  ye  every  man  in  his  place,  etc.",. 
that  it  exacts  a  perfectly  still,  motionless  condition.  "  Every 
one,''  he  expounds,  "  must  remain  in  the  same  place  and 
position  in  which  he  is  found  on  the  Sabbath,  till  evening, 
that  is,  if  sitting,  that  he  keep  sitting,  or  if  lying,  that  he 
maintain  this  posture  all  day." 

Abulfeda  (14th  century),  in  his  Samaritan  Chronicle, 
asserts  of  the  Dositheans,  that  they  held  it  unlawful  on  the 
Sabbath  to  drink  from  brazen  or  glass  vessels,  or  to  feed  or 
water  domestic  animals  :  food  and  water  must  be  placed 
before  them  before  the  Sabbath  begins. 

(11) 


^286  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  ; 

^^   Hausrath,  'Hist,  of  N.  T.  Times,'  does  not  distinguish     i 
as    to    the   time    of  both    controversies.     He   names    them     j 
together  with  the  disciples'  neglect  of  fasting  and  the  con-     ! 
versing  of  Jesus  with  publicans  and  sinners  (Mark  i.  35-39),      \ 
as  having  brought  on  the  open  opposition  to  him  by  the 
Rabbis  of  Capernaum.    As  in  the  opposition  to  his  ministry     ; 
the    officials  of  Antipas  had  a  common  interest    with    the 
Pharisees,  that  writer  further  advances,  that  he  was  by  this 
circumstance    driven  out  of  Capernaum   (Mark  iii.  7),  and 
"his  life  was  from  that  time  a  wandering  one." 

*^  The  "  deuteroproton  "   of  Luke  vi    i,  which  is  in  our 
English  version  rendered  "  on  the  second  Sabbath  after  the      , 
first,"  is  not  yet  sufficiently  explained.     Keim  finds   Sea-      ; 
iiger's  interpretation,  that  it  meant  "the  first  Sabbath  after      ■ 
the  second  day  of  Easter"  (Passover),  as  the  most  probable 
of  all. 

^^   Graetz,  History,  iii.  third  edition,  makes  a   short  cut      ■ 
of  the    relation    in    Matt.  xii.    1-8.     He  declares  the  entire 
narration  as  a    Pauline  tendency-interpolation.      For,  rea- 
sons he,  "  if,  as  it  is  given  out  in  v.  8,  man  is  lord  of  the  Sab-      ; 
bath,  then  the  Sabbath  is  on  the  whole  abolished."     But,  we      ' 
protest  (see  our   text),   Jesus   did   in   that  verse  not  at  all      i 
express  a  general  human  view,  but  an  exaggerated  Messi- 
anic one   about    himself.     Graetz    adheres   to   the    notion,      | 
that    Jesus    "did   not  at  all  irritate  the  existing  Judaism.       j 
Consistently   with    it   he   must   pronounce   all    antinomian      I 
passages    credited    to    Jesus,    interpolated  !      So   does    he,      j 
indeed,  declare  the  passage   in    which   Jesus  exalts  himself 
above  the   Temple    (Matt.  xii.    6).     In   keeping   with  that 
notion  is  also  his  peremptory  judgment,  that  "the  authen-      I 
ticity  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  more  than  suspicious,"      : 
mainly  because  "  it  partly  conveys  Jesus'  intention  of  oppos- 
ing his  own  new  doctrine  to  the  Law."  ^ 

"*"  Keim,  1.  c  p.  365,  interprets  the  meaning  of  this  sen- 
tence, that  he  wished  to  say,  "here  is  a  higher  dispensator 
for  the  disciples  than  the  temple  is  for  the  priests."  ; 

"*'  In  his  claim  of  supernatural  power  in  healing  the  sick  I 
and  the  possessed,  Jesus  proceeded  on  the  pretension  of  ; 
his  divine-like  Messiahism.  By  virtue  of  this  he  presumed  1 
to  have  the  faculty  to  forgive  sins,  and  thus  remove  the  ' 
cause  of  the  disease.  [ 

Bodily  ailments  and  maladies  as  well  as  suffering  in  gen- 
eral, were  in  ancient  Judaism  mostly  regarded  as  afflictions      ' 
'for  sin,  or  at  least  as  Divine  visitations  for  some  object  of 
discipline.     The  causal  interconnection  of  sickness  and  sin 
naturally  evolved  from  passages  of  the  Pentateuch,  such  as       ! 
Ex.  XV.  26.  xxiii.  25,  Lev.  xxvi.  14-16,  Deut.  vii.    15,  xxviii. 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  287 

15,  sq.  It  is  again  markedly  expressed  in  Isa.  xxxviii.  17. 
And  it  has,  further,  been  sagaciously  supported  by  a  Rabbi 
of  the  third  century,  from  the  parallel  occurrence  of  both 
terms  in  Ps.  ciii.  v.  3  (  B.  Nedarim,  f.  41 ).  The  ground- 
sentiment  of  the  majority  of  the  Rabbis  of  antiquity  seems 
to  have  been,  hakkol  bide  shamayim  "all  things  are  with 
and  come  from  God,"  that  is,  are  disciplinary  dispositions 
of  God.  Diseases,  all  sorts  of  them,  are  included.  Even 
those  distempers  originating,  as  it  was  believed,  from 
stellar  (fatalistic),  or  elemental  (  accidental ),  or  even  from 
magic  influences  (such  as  the  evil  eye,  or  the  fiendish  work 
of  witches  and  demons),  point  to  God  as  the  first  design- 
ing and  dispensing  Cause.  This  is  the  gist  of  Talmudical 
passages  like  those  of  B.  Baba  Metsia  f.  107  ;  Ketuboth  f. 
30;  Nedarim  f.  49  ;  Baba  Bathra  f.  144;  Cholin  i.J,  and 
others.  In  the  last  place  a  Rabbi  is  even  credited  with  the 
extravagant  sentence,  that  *'  no  one  bumps  his  finger  but 
it  is  so  decreed  in  Heaven."  In  the  name  of  the  same 
Rabbi  there  is  frequently  produced  in  the  Talmud  the  say- 
ing :  "All  things  are  dispensed  by  God,  only  affections  of 
the  body  entailed  by  exposure  to  cold  (and  hot)  air  are 
purely  casual,"  that  is  , independent  of  God's  disposition. 

(There  is  surely  no  consistency  in  the  two  quoted  sen- 
tences of  the  same  Rabbi.  But  they  were  evidently  not 
intended  to  be  strictly  dogmatic.  The  Rabbi  was  happy 
to  have  found  for  each  a  corresponding  Scripture  accom- 
modation, from  which  he  could  interpret  either.  This 
sufficed  him  for  exhibiting  his  sayings  as  brilliant  pieces  of 
Scripture  exegesis.  That  others  should  ever  refer  to  them 
with  a  doctrinal  view,  was  supposably  far  from  his  mind). 

It  may  yet  be  mentioned  that  other  Rabbis  did  evidently 
not  agree  with  him  on  the  hypothesis,  that  suffering  from 
exposure  to  cold  or  heat  is  not  ordained  by  God  ;  see  B. 
Ketuboth  1.  c.  It  may,  farther,  be  pertinent  to  observe 
here  that  it  is  on  the  whole  most  difficult  to  positively 
decide  how  the  generality  of  the  learned  Jews  have,  in  the 
few  centuries  before  and  after  Jesus,  thought  and  believed 
concerning  the  various  casualties  and  ills  which  flesh  is 
heir  to.  While  we  prefer  to  assume  from  a  number  of  Rab- 
binical passages,  that  those  doctors  disavowed  the  theory 
that  bare  accidents  could,  independently  of  God's  Provi- 
dence, cause  bodily  injuries  or  sickness. — and  this  would  be 
in  keeping  with  Scripture  that  characterizes  even  accidents 
as  Divine  causations  ;  compare  chiefly  Ex.  xxi.  13, — we  are 
yet,  on  the  other  hand,  confronted  by  contrary  Rabbinical 
sentiments,  also  embodied  in  the  Talmud.  In  Jer.  Sabb.  f. 
14.  the  following  is  proposed:     "In    ninety-nine  cases  out 


288  THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

of  a  hundred,  it  is  not  God's  interference  to  which  fatal 
bodily  injuries  and  suffering  are  due,  but  mere  accident, 
si5ch  as  the  effect  of  the  evil  eye.  self-exposure  to  excessive 
cold  or  heat,  or  other  indiscretions,  referrible  to  man 
alone." 

Jesus  had  evidently  assimilated  in  his  mind  the  pre-emi- 
nently Jewish  view,  that  bodily  suffering  is  inflicted  by  God, 
and  that  with  a  disciplinary  purpose,  chiefly  in  punishment 
of  some  offence  committed  against  him.  That  sickness  is  the 
result  of  sin, — this  idea  underlies  his  argument  in  Matt.  ix.  5, 
6.  See  also  Keim  1.  c.  iii.  214,  who  says  regarding  the  case 
produced  there  :  "Jesus  looked  upon  his  illness  as  the  result 
of  sin,"  and  quotes  as  recurrences  of  this  sentiment,  Matt, 
xii.  45,  Luke  xiii.  2,  ii,  John  v.  14,  ix.  i.  (We  have  to  note, 
however,  that  the  last-named  passage  shows  only  its  preva- 
lence with  Jesus'  disciples,  not  with  himself.  He,  on  the  con- 
trary, disabuses  their  mind  of  the  notion  that  the  blindness  of 
the  man  in  question  was  due  to  sin).  As  a  religious  theory  it 
was  apparently  in  accord  with  the  pious  perceptions  of  his 
Jewish  contemporaries,  or,  at  any  rate,  of  most  of  them. 
He  only  gave  it  an  obnoxious  turn  by  applying  it  to  his 
pretension  of  being  able  to  forgive  sins,  in  his  presumed 
capacity  of  the  Messiah.  As  such,  he  conveyed  in  his 
argument,  he  could  surely  cure  diseases.  Their  cause — sin 
— being  once  removed  by  the  use  of  his  supernatural  power 
in  dispensing  pardon,  the  effect — sickness — must  be  lifted 
of  itself.  It  was  surely  not  difficult  for  his  orthodox  hearers 
to  get  at  the  drift  of  his  argumentation. 

As  to  his  pretension  of  healing  the  possessed,  that  is, 
casting  the  evil  spirit  or  spirits  out  of  the  victims  on  whom 
they  had  fastened  themselves,  this  too  had  in  his  mind  a 
Messianic  bearing.  By  compelling  the  fiends,  by  the  force 
of  the  spirit  of  God  within  him  (see  Matt.  xii.  28),  to  leave 
the  body,  and  thus  beating  Satan  and  diminishing  his  fatal 
sway,  he  claimed  to  pave  the  way  to  the  kingdom  of  God 
and  the  exclusive  rule  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  or,  as  it  is  indi- 
cated in  V.  28,  to  have  actually  brought  on  that  kingdom. 
See  Hausrath,  *  N.  T.  Times,'  ii.  p.  190,  who  observes  on  the 
expostulation  in  Matthew  ib.:  "It  is  his  opinion  that  the 
casting  out  of  devils  by  the  Spirit  of  God  proves  the  actual 
advent  of  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  this  assumption  Jesus 
supports  by  the  farther  reference,  that  his  breaking  into 
the  house  of  the  strong  man — the  devil — clearly  shows  that 
the  strong  man  had  been  previously  bound,  and  that  con- 
sequently the  kingdom  of  the  devil  had  come  to  an  end." 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  289 

^*  To  accurately  determine  in  such  passages  of  Rabbini- 
cal free  and  easy  exposition  or  narrative,  whether  the  term 
Minean  was  to  denote  a  pagan, —  Roman  or  other, — or  a 
Gentile  Christian,  will  forever  be  a  futile  attempt.  The 
Rabbinical  relations  were  put  down  or  transcribed  with 
utter  indifference  to  historical  correctness.  We  have  there- 
fore to  use  the  greatest  caution  in  utilizing  them. 

How  difficult  it  is  to  reach  an  authentic  conclusion  as  to 
the  meaning  of  Minean  employed  in  the  Rabbinical  nomen- 
clature, will  appear  from  the  following.  Immediately  after 
that  colloquy  between  Akiba  and  Tinnius  Rufus,  the  Mid- 
rash  contains  a  dispute  on  the  validity  of  the  rite  of  cir- 
cumcision, alleged  to  have  been  had  between  a  Rabbi  of 
the  second  century  C.  E.  and  a  *  philosopher.'  The  objec- 
tion which  the  latter  raised  to  it  was,  that  "  if  God  wanted 
circumcision,  it  cannot  be  seen  why  he  did  not  command 
it  already  to  Adam  ?"  From  the  juxtaposition  of  both  the 
colloquy  and  this  dispute  we  should  judge  that  the  'philoso- 
pher' was  likewise  intended  for  a  cultured  or  philosophically 
educated  Roman,  such  as  the  governor  Tinnius  Rufus.  And 
surely  would  we  in  the  premises,  from  the  title  '  philoso- 
pher' which  the  olden  Rabbis  so  often  used  interchange- 
ably with  '  Minean,'  be  justified  to  detect  such  a  one  in  that 
personage.  Yet  when  we,  on  the  other  hand,  learn  from 
external  literature  that  the  same  argument  attributed  in 
the  Midrash  to  the  philosopher,  was  in  substance,  as  it  will 
appear  by  and  by,  frequently  employed  by  Gentile  Chris- 
tians, we  are  at  once  determined  to  change  our  opinion 
and  assume,  that  the  personage  styled  there  philosopher, 
was  a  Gentile  convert  to  Christianity.  We  consequently 
become  even  further  disposed  to  conjecture, — though  there 
is  no  intrinsic  cause  for  calling  in  question  the  arguments 
attributed  in  the  Midrash  to  Rufus  in  his  colloquy  with 
Akiba  ;  see  also  above  p.  82, — that  the  narrator  in  that 
Rabbinical  compilation  of  free  and  easy  expositions  had 
even  in  relating  this  colloquy  no  other  impression  on  his 
mind,  than  the  one  which  had  come  to  him  from  actual 
hearing,  or  from  the  known  fact,  that  Gentile  Christians  were 
used  to  attack  both  the  Sabbath  and  circumcision  with 
arguments  such  as  he  reproduced  there.  The  reason  why  he 
connected  Tinnius  Rufus  with  arguments  against  the  Sab- 
bath, though  he  may  have  mentally  alluded  to  Gentile 
Christians,  is  easily  suggested  to  have  been,  because  that 
governor  was  traditionally  known  as  a  frequent  disputant 
on  Jewish  ritualistic  and  doctrinal  subjects.  By  introduc- 
ing him  there  as  a  questioner  on  the   Sabbath,  there  would 


290  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

be  gained  the  advantage  of  variation  in  tiie  narratives.  In 
reality,  however,  he  may  have  alluded  in  his  mind,  in  this 
instance  as  well  as  in  the  subsequently  produced  invective 
against  circumcision,  to  Gentile  Christians. 

That  this  class  frequently  used  the  above-stated  argument 
against  circumcision,  appears  from  Justin's  Dialogue  with 
Trypho,  ch.  xix.  There,  it  is  true,  the  objection  differs  some- 
what in  form  from  the  one  quoted  above  from  the  Midrash. 
It  reads:  "If  circumcision  were  needed,  God  would  not  have 
created  Adam  uncircumcised."  But  this  difference  is  unes- 
sential. The  attack  is  substantially  the  same  in  both  argu- 
ments. The  validity  of  circumcision  is  in  both  accounts 
disputed  on  the  ground,  that  God  had  not  made  it  a  law 
with  the  first  man  of  Scripture.  See  also  Otto's  commentary 
in  loco,  who  cites  TertuUian,  Cyprian,  and  Lactantius,  as 
having  reasoned  in  the  same  strain  as  Justin,  in  their 
polemics  against  the  rite  of  circumcision. 

^^  Hausrath,  in  ranking  here  the  intercourse  with  pub- 
licans and  sinners  with  the  rest  of  Jewish  ordinances, 
betrays  a  superficiality  which  we  can  only  indulge  in  a 
Christian  writer  unacquainted  with  the  old  Rabbinical 
literature.  There  is,  to  our  knowledge,  not  the  slightest 
trace  in  that  literature  of  an  ordinance  as  to  commerce 
with  publicans.  Nor  is  there  a  specific  one  to  be  found  on 
the  commerce  with  sinners. 

Regarding  the  publicans, — a  term  used  in  the  New 
Testament  versions  that  would,  however,  be  much  more 
correctly  rendered  with  the  generic  name  tax-officials, — 
this  averse  notice  only  has  come  down  to  us,  that  they 
were  hated  by  the  ordinary  Israelite  for  their  frequent 
extortions,  peculations,  and  other  irregularities  committed 
in  their  office.  Whether  Jewish  or  pagan,  they  were  com- 
monly associated  in  the  thought  of  the  Israelite,  of  the 
Phariseic  sect  and  principles  at  least,  with  robbers  ;  see 
especially  Mishnah  B.  Baba  Kamma  f.  113.  They  arc  at 
times  even  named  in  one  category  and  strain  with  high- 
waymen ;  see  ib.  f.  114,  and  Sifra  f.  91. 

That,  besides,  the  heart  of  the  truly  religious  aud  patriotic 
Israelite  chafed  and  even  revolted,  at  once  on  religious 
and  economical  grounds,  at  the  several  kinds  of  oppressive 
tribute  imposed  since  the  Roman  institution  of  the  census, — 
three  kinds  are  named  in  the  Pesikta,  sect.  Shekalim  f  it: 
gulgoleth  "capitation-tax,"  arnona  (read,  annona)  "land- 
tax,"  and  demos,  the  nature  of  which  is  hard  to  decipher 
from  the  name,  which  has  possibly  come  down  in  a  muti- 
lated form,  instead  of  telos  "  toll  "  (  the   last  we  presume  to 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  29I 

conjecture  in  spite  of  the  authenticated  frequent  use  by  the 
ancient  Rabbis  of  the  term  "demos"  in  various  signifi- 
cance),— is  reasonably  set  forth  by  Hausrath  in  the  same 
work. 

Even  Jesus  who,  as  the  gospels  bear  witness,  freely^ 
associated  with  tax-officials,  and  had  even  an  apostle,. 
Matthew,  from  this  class,  implicitly  admitted  their  corrupt 
ways  (  Luke  iii.  13  ),  classifying  them  even  directly  under 
the  generic  stigma  of  sinners  (Matt.  ix.  13). 

Nay,  it  seems  to  us  that  he  had  at  the  early  part  of  his 
public  life  detested  them  as  much  as  every  other  orthodox 
Israelite.  For,  in  the  Sermon  on  the  ^Nlount,  he  names 
them  in  one  strain  of  speech  in  the  category  of  Gentiles, 
that  is,  pagan  polytheists  ;  see  Matt.  v.  46,  47.  (  Luke  has 
in  this  parallel,  v.  32,  "sinners"  in  place  of  either  publi- 
cans or  Gentiles).  And  even  in  the  last  days  of  his  career, 
when  he  had  already  habitually  been  befriending  them,  he 
riamed  them  yet  together  with  harlots  (  ib.  xxi.  31,  32). 
This  shows,  that,  though  he  then  doubtless  counted  a  num- 
ber of  publicans  in  the  ranks  of  professors  of  his  ]\Iessiah- 
dom,  as  must  appear  from  his  awarding  to  them  the  prece- 
dence as  to  entrance  into  the  Kingdom  above  the  "chief 
priests  and  elders  "  of  the  Jewish  people,  he  could,  from  the 
fact  of  their  generally  known  and  admitted  corruption,  not 
help  combining  them  at  least  with  fornicators.  The 
natural  conclusion  from  this  juxtaposition  of  publicans  with 
harlots  would  even  appear  to  be  that,  notwithstanding  the 
conversion  of  a  number  of  publicans  to  the  belief  in  his 
Messiahdom,  the  idea  of  their  being  as  a  class  confirmed 
sinners,  irrepressibly  suggested  itself  to  his  mind  and 
speech  even  so  late  as  that.  This  conclusion  would  result 
from  the  bare  circumstance  of  the  harlots  being  placed  by 
the  side  of  the  publicans.  The  former  must  at  that  con- 
juncture have  been  harlots  still,  or  he  would  have  desig- 
nated them,  as  reformed  and  redeemed  persons,  under  a 
different  name,  or  at  least  with  a  vindicating  epithet.  So 
must  the  publicans,  despite  his  efforts  at  gaining  over  a 
number  of  them  to  his  Messianic  creed,  have  then  as  a  class- 
practically  been  as  corrupt  as  they  ever  were  before. 

With  the  generic  name  'sinner'  the  critics  of  Jesus  had,, 
according  to  Luke  xix.  7,  branded  also  Zacchaeus,  the 
chief  of  the  publicans,  with  whom  he  had  gone  to  lodge. 

How  it  came  that  the  tax  officials  were  named  and  even: 
identified  with  sinners,  and  in  what  general  or  special 
sense  the  Hebrew  equivalent  of  this  appellation  wa."; 
employed  by  orthodox  Jews  in  speaking  of  them,  is  diffi- 
cult of  exact  definition.     Graetz  (iii.  third  ed.),  distinguish- 


292  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

iiig  three  different  lower  and  despised  classes  to  which 
Jesus  addressed  himself  in  his  public  career,  viz.,  the  sin- 
ners, the  custom  officers  and  publicans,  and  the  ig^norant 
from  the  populace,  sugf^ests  that  those  tax  officials  had  "on 
account  of  abetting  the  Roman  interests  turned  their  back 
to  the  Law,  and  led  a  dissolute  life."  Where  he  collected 
this  information,  he  does  not  state.  We,  on  our  part, 
would,  to  account  for  the  combination  and  identification  of 
publicans  and  sinners  in  the  gospels,  hazard  the  following 
conjecture. 

We  presume  that  in  the  days  of  Jesus  the  orthodox 
teachers  or  even  laymen  nicknamed  those  of  the  common 
people  who  were  marked  by.  habits  of  lawless  violence  or 
of  defiant  violation  of  religious  laws,  haryone.  This  word 
they  probably  adopted  from  the  Greek  '  barys,'  Hebraizing 
it  by  affixing  the  ending  '  on.'  In  two  places  of  the  Talmud 
(B.  Synh.  f.  37,  Taanith  f.  23)  they  are  represented  as 
impenitent  religious  and,  doubtless,  also  moral  recreants, 
and  in  a  third  place  as  a  viciously  vexatious  set  (B.  Berach. 
f.  10),  with  whom  the  learned  and  pious  would  have  no 
intercourse,  nay,  on  whom  they  would  often  imprecate  that 
God  might  take  them  from  the  world.  Some,  again,  were 
charitable  enough  either  to  pray  to  God  that  he  may  cause 
them  to  repent,  or  to  use  personal  suasion  by  which  they 
hoped  to  bring  them  to  their  senses  and  a  change  of  their 
evil  conduct  (see  the  quoted  passages).  In  a  fourth  place 
of  the  Talmud  (B.  Gittin  f.  56)  even  the  zealots  in  the  rev- 
olutionary war  against  the  Romans  are  designated  baryone. 
That  they  have  drawn  forth  this  stigma  from  the  Rabbis 
who  were  mostly  for  peace  and  submission  to  the  Romans, 
already  during  that  war,  should  convincingly  result  from 
the  introductory  part  of  this  last  Talmudical  relation, 
which  bears  a  thoroughly  historic  stamp. 

Now  from  all  these  passages  combined  we  conclude  that 
the  'baryone'  were  in  the  first  centuries  of  the  common 
era  the  synonyms  for  those  abandoned  sinners  from  the 
populace,  who  had  not  only  rudely  set  at  defiance  the  relig- 
ious ceremonial  of  Israel,  but  also  made  no  scruple  to  annoy 
and  exasperate  their  pious  and  decent  neighbors  by  differ- 
ent violent  demonstrations,  or  even  occasionally  to  assault 
their  propertj'  and  even  persons.  That  they  thus  awakened 
the  deep  execration  of  all  the  righteous  Israelites,  and 
received  from  them  that  odious  title  in  return,  is  not  to  be 
wondered  at.  We  propose  that  it  was  this  kind  of  violent 
sinners  which  the  Pharisees  ranked  both  in  their  thought 
and  speech  with  the  hated  tax-officials,  since  these,  too, 
passed  with  them,  for  their  violent  and  fraudulent  practices, 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  293 

as  equal  to  robbers.  And  we  further  surmise  that  both 
the  publicans  and  sinners  stood  coupled  in  the  original  of 
Matthew  respectively  as  "  mochesin  "  and  "  baryone."  The 
translator  of  this  gospel  into  Greek,  meeting  with  the  lat- 
ter name  which  was  neither  Hebrew  nor  Chaldaic,  but  was 
adopted  from  the  Greek  to  signify  coarse  and  fierce  relig- 
ious and  moral  outlaws,  found  himself  in  a  quandary  how  to 
render  it,  and  resorted  to  the  next  best  equivalent  that 
should  express  the  currently  Jewish  stigma.  The  generic 
word  hamartoloi  "  sinners  "  occurred  to  him  as  such,  and  he 
put  it  down  as  the  most  suitable.  While  we  give  this  as  a 
mere  conjecture,  we  yet  claim  for  it  a  greater  merit  than  can 
consist  in  Graetz's  tracing  the  word  sinners  used  with  pub- 
licans in  the  gospels,  to  '  abaryanim,'  as  denoting  "  viola- 
tors of  the  Law."  We  do  not  believe,  from  the  very  rare 
occurrence  of  this  later  Hebrew  word  in  the  Rabbinical  lit- 
erature, that  it  had  gained  currency  with  the  learned  of  old 
to  brand  with  it  Judaic  Law-breakers.  Why  not  rather 
think  of  the  pure  Hebrew  word  "reshaim"  or  "  posheim," 
as  corresponding  to  those  sinners  .''  The  word  reshaim  was 
currently  used  by  the  ancient  Rabbis  as  the  opposite  of 
tsadikim  "  righteous,"  or  kesherim  "  worthy."  Graetz's 
further  proposition  that  those  sinners  were  "  such  as  had 
been  expelled  from  the  Jewish  society  for  religious  trans- 
gressions," is  destitute  of  all  warrant. 

If  our  above  conjecture  should  be  deemed  too  hazardous, 
we  advance  yet  another  original  Jewish  concept,  as  possi- 
bly embodied  in  the  hamartoloi  "sinners"  of  the  gospels. 
We  allude  to  the  am  ha-arets  "common  people,"  or.  as  the 
olden  Rabbis  were  used  to  employ  this  term,  an  individual  of 
the  common  people, — provided,  of  course,  that  these  were 
already  in  Jesus'  time  despised  by  the  learned  for  levity  as 
to  questions  of  religious  purity,  the  tithes,  and  the  Sabbatic 
year.  Space  forbids  us  to  treat  at  length  of  the  interrela- 
tions of  the  "am  ha-arets"  and  the  learned,  in  the  several 
centuries  before  and  after  our  era.  It  would  be  of  great 
interest  at  once  to  the  Jewish  and  Christian  intelligent 
world,  if  a  competent  writer  undertook  to  furnish  a  lucid, 
critical  description  of  them.  We  will  here  briefly  state 
that  it  is  quite  possible,  that  the  common  people  were 
already  in  Jesus'  time  signalized  and  shunned  by  the  Phari- 
sees as  suspects  with  regard  to  those  three  points. 

Whether  the  rule  existed  already  then,  that  the  clothes 
of  an  am  ha-arets  defile  a  Pharisee  (  Mishnah,  Chagigah  ii. 
7),  to  the  extent  that  he  would,  after  coming  in  contact 
with  them  by  touching,  suspending,  carrying  them,  or  by 
sitting,  lying,  standing,  or   leaning   on  them,  be  religiously 


294  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

polluted  till  evening,  both  in  person  and  as  to  his  own 
clothes,  we  do  not  know.  The  reason  why  the  clothes  of 
the  am  ha-arets  should  be  impure  to  a  Pharisee,  is  in  the 
Talmud  stated  to  be,  that  his  wife  might  in  her  own  defile- 
ment have  sat  on  them.  Naturally  this  rigid  restriction 
must  have  prohibited  any  close  intercourse  and  meeting  by 
a  Pharisee  with  an  am  ha-arets,  even  in  a  public  place,  not 
to  say,  at  the  table.  Jesus,  having  doubtless  been  held  and 
treated  as  a  "  Chabher," — this  as  well  as  the  term  "  Chasid  " 
was  the  distinctively  honorable  title  of  a  Pharisee  or  Phari- 
seic  doctor  of  the  Law,  in  the  mouths  of  the  later  Rabbis  at 
least, — would  accordingly  have  properly  been  censured  for 
sitting  down  to  eat  with  any  of  this  unlettered  class. 

Again,  we  meet  with  a  relative  restriction  in  the  Tal- 
mud, called  forth  by  the  suspicion  cast  on  the  am  ha-arets 
for  wanting  a  sufficient  seriousness  as  to  tithes.  It  is  : 
"One  must  not  make  converse  with  an  am  ha-arets.  for 
fear  he  would  at  length  give  him  to  eat  things  from  which 
the  tithes  had  not  been  separated"  (Nedarim  f  20).  Yet 
there  is  no  certainty  about  the  existence  of  this  injunction 
in  Jesus'  time,  either. 

Now,  though  we  cannot  adduce  any  direct  evidence  from 
the  Rabbinical  literature  that,  on  account  of  various  more 
or  less  grave  suspicions  of  ceremonial  levity  resting  against 
the  unlettered  Jewish  people,  a  decided  and  open  antago-- 
nism  to  these  prevailed  with  the  learned  already  at  that 
early  period,  we  are  warranted  to  infer  it  from  relative 
gospel  accounts.  That  the  Pharisees  were  then  most  austere 
concerning  rules  of  ceremonial  purity  and  the  widely  rami- 
fied tithing,  is  clear  from  various  statements  produced  by  the 
evangelists;  see  especially  Matt,  xxiii.  23,  25.  From  this 
it  is  fair  to  conclude  that  the  common  people  will,  at  least 
as  to  the  intricate  rules  of  purity,  not  have  succeeded,  even 
if  they  had  a  mind  to,  to  come  up  to  the  stern  demands  of 
purification  as  exacted  by  the  Pharisees.  These  will  con- 
sequently have  been  impelled  to  keep  aloof  from  them  as 
much  as  possible.  The  association  with  them  was  unavoid- 
ably fraught  with  a  continuous  doubt  of  religious  purity  and 
apprehension  of  defilement.  That  they  regarded  them  as 
'sinners'  with  whom  no  Chaber  should  sustain  company,  is 
therefore  not  impossible.  This  stigma  may,  then,  have 
been  fastened  on  the  common  people  in  the  time  of  Jesus, 
so  that  reference  was  made  to  them  in  the  reproaches  of 
the  Pharisees  about  his  close  association  with  them. 

A  third  interpretation  of  the  'sinners'  whom  Jesus  had 
befriended,  is  yet  possible.  It  is  well  known  that  the  sick 
were     in    the    gospels    often    represented    as    sufferers   on 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  295 

account  of  sin.  In  Luke  vii.,  a  Pharisee  takes  exception  to 
Jesus  allowing  himself  to  be  attended  by  a  female  'sinner/ 
in  the  manner  set  forth  in  vv.  37,  38.  This  woman  was 
perhaps  known  to  the  Pharisee  as  afflicted  with  a  disorder 
like  that  mentioned  in  Matt.  ix.  20.  In  this  case  her  touch 
was  ceremonially  polluting,  and  the  Pharisee  had,  from  his 
religious  legal  standpoint,  a  perfect  right  to  call  Jesus  to 
account  for  that  attendance.  Some  men  and  women  with 
such  like  physical  disorders,  whose  impurity  fell  partly 
under  the  head  of  direct  Mosaic  inhibitions,  or  were  partly 
rigidly  construed  by  the  Pharisees  from  the  respective  texts 
of  the  Pentateuch,  may  many  a  time  have  addressed  Jesus 
with  the  entreaty  to  cure  them.  The  healing  involving  at 
the  same  time  the  forgiving  of  the  sins  in  punishment  of 
which  the  bodily  affliction  was  believed  to  have  been 
visited,  it  may  fairly  be  supposed  that  the  sinners,  named 
as  such  with  publicans  or  separately,  were  meant  to  be  that 
sort  of  diseased  people. 

■'"  Jesus  wished  to  set  forth  by  the  illustration  in  Matt.  ix. 
I";,  merely  the  inconsistency  of  allowing  mournful  senti- 
ments to  intrude  themselves  on  Messianically  transported 
and  exulting  souls,  such  as  he  implicitly  represented  those 
of  his  disciples  to  be.  The  two  similitudes  following  in  vv. 
16  and  17,  Jesus  chose  with  the  view  of  strengthening  the 
illustrative  force  of  the  main  contrast,  in  the  previous  verse, 
of  groom  and  gloom.  He  aimed  by  them  to  impress  more 
vividly  on  the  criticising  disciples  of  John  the  impropriety 
of  mixing  opposites  in  the  sentiment  and  usage  of  life. 
The  illustration  in  v.  15,  should  characterize  the  nuptial 
feast  and  the  fast  as  sharp  opposites.  The  two  subsequent 
ones  were  meant  to  be  nothing  but  similar  instances  of 
striking  contrast.  He  added  them  as  corollaries  in  the 
fluency  of  speech,  to  show  yet  more  convincingly  the  cor- 
rectness of  his  and  his  followers'  position.  That  he  should 
have  propounded  them  with  any  doctrinal  purpose,  as 
Canon  Farrar  opines  in  his  'The  Life  of  Christ,'  ch.  xxiv.^ 
is  unwarranted.  This  author  proposes  that  the  two  meta- 
phors in  vv.  16  and  17,  were  to  point  the  dogma,  that  "  the 
new  spirit  was  to  be  embodied  in  wholly  renovated  forms  ; 
the  new  freedom  was  to  be  untrammelled  by  obsolete  and 
meaningless  limitations  ;  the  spiritual  doctrine  was  to  be 
sundered  forever  from  mere  elaborate  and  external  cere- 
monials." 

All  this  is  a  mere  waste  of  words,  and  another  example 
of  that  author's  pompous  and  profuse  diction  on  the  one 
hand,  and,  on  the  other,  of  his  fixed  effort  at  the  apotheosis 
of  Jesus  with  regard  to  any  of  his  sayings  and  acts.     It  is 


296  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

surely  going  too  far  to  find  every  metaphor  used  by  Jesus 
pregnant  with  the  deep  meaning  of  "  spiritual  doctrine." 
To  contrast  old  and  new  by  the  simile  of  new  wine"  put  in 
old  skins  and  the  reverse,  was  evidently  common  among 
the  olden  Jews.  See  Pirke  Aboth  iv.  27,  where  the  "  new 
skin  full  of  old  wine  "  is  to  convey  the  moral,  that  one's  age 
ought  not  to  prejudice  us  for  or  against  him  in  our  judg- 
ment on  his  knowing  faculty  ;  for  there  is  often  found  a 
youthful  person  with  profound  understanding  and  insight, 
clearly  settled  views,  and  a  large  fund  of  well  assimilated 
objects  of  knowledge,  whereas  many  a  full  grown  or 
aged  one  is  deficient  even  in  that  wisdom,  which  the 
experience  of  many  years  is  expected  to  impart.  The 
meaning  in  this  simile  is,  indeed,  totally  different  from  that 
used  by  Jesus.  But  the  Jewish  habit  of  employing  this  kind 
of  homely  metaphors  for  contrasts,  is  not  the  less  shown 
forth  in  that  Rabbinical  sentence.  The  kindred  one  attrib- 
uted to  Jesus  suggested  itself  to  him  in  the  same  way, 
namely,  through  common  Jewish  usage.  Such  and  the  like 
metaphors  were  readily  and  easily  formed  by  reflecting  per- 
sons in  a  country,  where  wine-growing  was  such  a  promi- 
nent pursuit.  There  is  nothing  exceptional  in  the  senten- 
tious application  of  them.  Nor  is  there  any  hidden  allu- 
sion to  Jesus'  own  spiritual  doctrine  to  be  detected  in  the 
one  employed  by  him  in  his  reply  to  John's  disciples. 

^^  The  phrase  used  here  for  the  performance  of  the  magi- 
cal cure  is,  "abad  milla."  It  occurs  in  the  same  sense  also  in 
B.  Synhedrin  f.  loi.  It  means  essentially,  in  the  Rabbin- 
ical phraseology,  to  '  do  a  thing  that  cures.'  The  ancient 
Rabbis  employed  it  also  for  bleeding, —  a  surgical  operation 
the  sanative  virtue  of  which  they  held  so  very  effectual  ; 
see  B.  Sabbath  f.  129.  In  the  Midrashic  passage  under 
notice,  as  well  as  in  that  of  Synhedrin  1.  c,  the  use  of  a 
formula  of  exorcism  is  doubtless  to  be  understood  by  that 
phrase.  The  Minean  curers — those,  namely,  of  the  Chris- 
tian sect,  for  there  were  Essenic  ones  as  well — were  Chris- 
tians of  Jewish  or  other  descent,  against  the  medical  treat- 
ment by  whom  a  Rabbinical  prohibition  had  been  passed  ; 
see  B.  Abodah  Zarah,  f.  27.  Its  chief  cause  was,  we  hold, 
because  they  employed  the  name  of  Jesus  as  a  divine  being 
in  their  healing  practices  and  exorcisms;  comp.  Jerus. 
Sabb.  ch.  xiv.  We  treat  of  all  this  at  large  in  our  work  on 
the  Mineans,  in  the  division,  '  The  Christians  as   Mineans.' 

^"  This  sage,  Jose,  was  one  of  the  presidential  pair  of  the 
theological  school  of  Jerusalem  in  the  Maccabean  times. 
He  was  one  of  the  sixty  Scribes — interchan.geably  called 
<^iasidim    in  i   Maccabees — who   were    singled   out   of  the 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 


297 


rest  of  the  suppliant  delegates  pleading  before  Bacchides 
and  the  Jewish  high-priest,  Alkimos,  for  justice  and  peace, 
to  suffer  death  on  one  same  day  (  i  Mace.  vii.  12-17).  It 
is  indeed  quite  possible  that  his  unscrupulous  and  pitiless 
nephew,  this  same  Alkimos,  derided  him  in  the  manner 
mentioned  in  the  Midrash.  He  had  when  high-priest,  as  it 
is  said  in  2  Mace.  xiv.  3,  "defiled  himself  willingly  in- the 
times  of  the  intermixture"  (namely,  with  pagans).  He 
had  also  maligned  the  adherents  of  Judas  Maccabeus  to 
Demetrius  (ib.  6).  His  uncle,  Jose,  was  his  extreme 
opposite  in  piety.  As  a  "  Chasid  of  the  priesthood"  (see 
B.  Chagigah  f.  16),  he  was  austere  as  to  ceremonial  purity, 
and  surely  also  very  strict  in  all  other  Jewish  observances. 
He  may,  too,  have  frequently  rebuked  his  nephew  for  his 
loose,  Hellenizing  manner  of  life.  This  may  have  aroused  his 
indignation,  which  it  is  to  be  supposed  that  he  vented  on 
his  uncle  on  the  day  when  he  was  to  suffer  martyrdom 
with  the  rest  of  the  doomed  Scribes,  in  the  mocking  way 
described  in  the  Midrash.  Alkimos'  appearance  on  horse- 
back on  the  Sabbath,  as  related  there,  we  may  safely  com- 
bine with  the  affair  reported  in  the  before- quoted  first  book 
of  the  Maccabees.  He  may  then  have  been  high  on  horse 
in  the  attendance  of  the  Syrian  commander,  and  designed 
to  make  that  mockery  doubly  sensitive  to  his  uncle,  by  the 
offence  he  would  give  him  by  such  demonstrative  disregard 
of  the  Sabbath  :  all  this,  we  surmise,  to  wreak  his  venge- 
ance on  the  rigorous  uncle  for  his  former  reprobations  of 
his  wanton   Grecianizing  departure  from  orthodox  Judaism. 


EXCURSUS  A. 


Strauss  (  A  New  Life  of  Jesus,  i.  291  sq.),  who  does  on  the 
•one  hand  not  own  an  Essenic,  that  is,  ascetic  and  dualistic 
standpoint  of  Jesus,  is  yet  strongly  inclined  to  discover  in 
these  instances  a  spirit  of  set  opposition  to  the  ceremonial 
service  of  the  Temple  :  first,  that  he  is  not  reported  to  have 
ever  taken  part  in  the  Jewish  sacrifices,  with  the  exception 
of  the  Paschal  lamb  ;  secondly,  that  he  acted,  as  he  did,  in 
the  Temple  (Matt.  xxi.  12  sq.  and  parallels)  ;  and,  mainly, 
that  the  witnesses  had  testified  his  disparaging  utterance 
about  it  (  Matt.  xxvi.  61).  He  further  supposes,  with  refer- 
ence to  this  utterance,  that  "  it  might  very  easily  be  the 
case.  .  .that  the  Jews  understood  only  too  well  the  expres- 
sion of  Jesus  about  his  reforming  purpose,  and  that  in  this 
(viz.,  the  purpose  of  rejecting  the  material  worship  of  the. 
Temple*  and  commending  and,  perhaps,  attempting  to  intro- 
duce a  spiritual  one  instead)  lay  the  ground  of  the  accusa- 
tion against  him  and  of  the  condemnation  of  him."  Keim, 
History  of  Jesus,  vi.  20,  contends  with  reference  to  John  iv. 
21,  that  the  latter  sentiment  is  a  late,  unhistorical  assertion, 
and  that — -Stephen  and  Mark  notwithstanding — Jesus  never 
announced  the  definitive  end  of  the  national  worship.  In  a 
Note  there  he  suggests  that  Mark  xiv.  58,  is  copied  from 
Acts  vii.  48. 

This  hypercritical  judgment  can,  however,  not  stand  the 
test  of  historical  inquiry.  Jesus'  antagonistic  attitude  to 
the  established  national  worship  of  the  Jews,  is  too  well 
attested  for  any  one  to  challenge  the  historicity  of  his  dis- 
paraging threats  of  its  cessation  or  overthrow.  We  have, 
in  our  text,  adduced  incontrovertible  proofs  of  this  antag- 
onism. Let  us  here  bring  forward  yet  another  point  par- 
ticularly worthy  of  note,  and  which  furnishes  a  very  strong 
additional  evidence  of  it,  though  only  circumstantial.  It  is, 
the  obvious  systematic  transmission  of  it,  as  though  of  a 
typical  mark  of  heredity,  through  the  entire  Jewish  and  Gen- 
tile Christian  literature,  the  earlier  as  well  as  the  later. 
The  opposition  to  sacrifice  being  peculiar  to,  and  significant 
of,  the  entire  body  of  Christian  sectaries  of  the  apostolic 
and  post-apostolic  age,  it  unmistakably  points  to  the 
■original  head  as  its  doctrinal  author. 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  299 

That  Jesus  had  really  uttered  the  denunciation  with  which 
he  was  charged  by  the  witnesses  (see  above),  or  "one  simi- 
lar in  import"  (so  Edward  Zeller),  would  first  of  all  appear 
from  its  repetition  by  Stephen,  a  year  or  two  after  Jesus' 
death,  in  the  form  reproduced  by  the  witnesses  against 
him  :  "  this  Jesus  of  Nazareth  shall  destroy  this  place,"  viz., 
at  his  Parousia.  Admitting  even  provisionally  with  Zeller 
and  Baur,  that  the  entire  narrative  of  Acts  vi.  9  to  vii.  60. 
is  unhistorical,  and  the  bare  fact  of  Stephen's  execution 
alone  indisputable,  are  we  not  at  all  events  justified  to  trace 
in  Stephen's  speech  at  least  the  tradition  of  the  disparage- 
ment by  Jesus  of  the  Jewish  national  Temple  service,  which 
the  Pauline  author  of  Acts  utilized  .'' 

That  this  tradition  differed  in  form  in  its  various  repro- 
ductions, as  will  be  seen  from  the  following,  can  surely  not 
detract  aught  from  the  merit  of  our  view,  that  the  opposi- 
tion to  the  Temple  service  was  continuous  in  Christianity 
from  Jesus  onward. 

Let  us  now  survey  the  course  of  this  tradition.  The 
Hellenist  Stephen,  or  the  author  of  Acts  speaking  in  his 
name,  has  given  forth  his  relative  diatribe  in  the  above- 
noted  narrative  of  Acts.  It  is  to  be  remarked,  however, 
that  he  has  not  correctly  echoed  Jesus' sentiment  about  the 
Temple.  Jesus  never  thought  of  assailing  the  Temple 
as  such,  that  is,  as  the  central  institution  of  Israel's  worship. 
He  held  it  in  awe, — as  we  have  set  forth  in  another  paper 
published  a  {^v^  years  ago, — opposing  only  the  sacrificial 
rites  carried  on  in  it.  Whereas  Stephen's  attack  is  directed 
against  the  hand-made  Temple,  the  natioi^.al-religious 
edifice,  as  such.  H?  condemns  Israel  and  with  them  Solo- 
mon himself,  for  rearing  a  structure  called  house  of  God, 
for  worship,  as  well  as  for  rejecting  the  holy  Spirit  that  had 
spoken  through  Isaiah  (see  ib.). 

Of  about  the  same  tenor  as  Stephen's  may  have  been 
Paul's  teachings  against  the  Temple,  of  which  the  Asiatic 
Jews  accused  him  (Acts  xxi.  28).  He  propounded  at  least 
the  same  sentiment  of  "God  not  dwelling  in  temples  made 
with  hands  "  (ib.  xvii.  24).  God  dwells  to  him  in  the  temple 
of  theheart  (2  Cor.  vi.  16). 

These  Hellenists  have,  then,  evidently  gone  in  their 
assaults  upon  the  Temple  much  beyond  Jesus,  whose 
thought  was  not  so  fir  swiyed  by  philosophical  specula- 
tions, that  he  should  have  disdained  to  employ  the  Scrip- 
tural expression  of  God  dwelling  in  the  Temple  (see  Matt. 
xxiii.  21).  Yet  we  may,  on  the  other  hand,  lay  it  down  as 
reasonably  certain,  that  they  would  not  have  made  such 
polemical  onslaughts  against  it,  had  they  not  found  a  war- 


300  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

rant  for  it  in  Jesus'  authenticated  antagonistic  attitude 
towards  it.  As  little  as  we  can  believe  that  Paul  would 
have  dared  to  fiercely  derogate  and  declare  as  abolished  the 
whole  Mosaic  Law,  had  he  not  found  the  outlines  for  such 
assumption  and  some  single  facts  of  opposition  to  it  in 
the  life  and  teaching  of  Jesus,  as  known  to  him  from  extant 
accounts,  so  little  can  we  disconnect  the  Hellenistic  Jewish 
Christian  attacks  on  the  Temple  from  the  kindred  ones 
made  before  by  Jesus. 

But  this  opposition  was  not  characteristic  of  Hellenistic 
Jewish  Christianity  alone.  It  was  avowedly  one  of  the 
cardinal  points  of  heretical  doctrine  with  the  Ebionite  sec- 
tion as  well,  and  prominently  so. 

It  deserves  especial  notice  that  their  reverence  for  the 
Master  was  unsurpassed  by  any  sect  that  ever  followed  a 
leader  or  head.  They  referred  to  Jesus  and  to  his  spoken 
word  and  example,  in  every  question  of  tenet  and  usage. 
In  their  well-known  implacable  opposition  to  sacrifice  they 
adverted  to  him,  too.  The  later  members  of  this  sect,  to 
which  the  author  of  the  Clementine  Homilies  unquestion- 
ably belongs,  quoted  him  as  authority  not  only  against  sac- 
rifice, but  once  even,  in  the  manner  of  the  before-named  two 
Hellenists,  Stephen  and  Paul,  against  the  notion  that  God 
was  in  the  Temple  (Hom.  iii.  49-56).  Jesus  having  to  this 
sect  been  the  "  true  prophet,"  his  directions  had  in  all  ques- 
tions to  be  sought,  and  were  actually  sought,  by  them. 
This  was,  in  truth,  a  dogmatic  rule  with  them. 

Now  it  may  be  said  that  the  Ebionites,  in  their 
intense  Essenic  detestation  of  animal  sacrifice,  may  not 
have  shrunk  from  many  exaggerations  relating  to  Jesus' 
real  position  towards  the  Temple  service.  This  is  possible, 
indeed.  Yet  for  all  that  is  it  to  be  conceived  that  their 
reference  to  him  at  all  as  to  his  hostile  attitude  to  it, 
was  unfounded  and  false  .-*  By  no  means  is  such  suppo- 
sition admissible.  The  real  affinity,  which  may  perhaps 
rightly  be  called  consanguinity,  that  existed  between  them 
and  Jesus,  the   Master,  at  once  precludes  it. 

We  have  positively  to  aflfirm  that  for  all  the  eclecticism 
with  which  Jesus  entered  into  the  body  of  the  Essenic 
views,  doctrines,  and  customs,  with  which  he  familiarized 
himself  either  at  his  stay  with  the  Baptist  (even  Strauss 
who  very  decidedly  rejects,  1.  c.  p.  292,  an  Essenic  doctrinal 
opposition  of  Jesus  to  sacrifice,  suggests  on  p.  265  ib.  that 
"Jesus  might  have  learned  much  from  him"),  or  by  reading 
some  works  of  that  sect,  which,  while  its  members  were 
bound  by  oath  to  the  greatest  secrecy  about  their  sectarian 
books  (Jps.,  Wars  ii.  8,  7j,  could  yet  not  hinder  novices  who 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  3OI 

left  their  monkish  retreats  after  the  first  year,  from  carrying 
away  with  them  some  copies,  and  making  that  use  of  them 
which  they  deemed  practicable  (comp.  Hausrath,  N.  T. 
Times,  i.  p.  165), — it  admits  of  no  doubt  that  he  stood  in  real 
spiritual  sympathy  with  Essenes  and  other  theosophists  of 
similar  principles  and  tendencies. 

That  Essenism  was,  further,  well  represented  in  the  early 
Church,  will  be  difficult  to  dispute.  Not  only  Epiphanius 
dates  the  existence  of  the  Ebionites — the  Christian  Essenes 
— to  the  apostolic  age  (  Haer.  xxx.),  but  Paul's  polemical 
references  in  Ep.  Col.  ii.  seem  to  Baur  (Paul  ii.  28)  and 
others,  to  point  to  the  same  sect.  Even  Ewald,  who 
adheres  yet  to  the  notion  by  which  the  learned  Frankel, 
too,  was  captivated,  that  the  Essenes  were  distinguished  by 
a  heightened  legalism  (see  Hist,  of  Israel,  vii.),  is  of  the 
opinion  that  there  entered  into  the  young  Church,  in  Paul's 
missionary  period,  a  number  from  this  sect,  by  which  cir- 
cumstance was  brought  forward  a  new  influential  form  of 
Christianity,  viz.,  Christian  Essenism.  Allusion  to  devotees 
of  this  new  Essenic  faction  he  finds  in  i  Cor.  vii.,  Rom. 
xiv.  2,  Col.  ii.,  and   suggests   also  as  likely  in  2  Cor.  x-xiii. 

On  the  marked  Essenic  traits  of  James  the  Just,  Jesus' 
brother,  and  even  of  the  previous  James,  the  apostle,  both  of 
whom  were  leaders  of  the  early  Church,  the  former  having 
repudiated  flesh  meat  and  the  latter  having,  as  we  tried  to 
demonstrate  in  Note  34.  in  the  three  out  of  the  four  apostolic 
.decrees,  implicitly  coincided  in  such  repudiation,  which, 
again,  was  sympathetically  connected  with  the  rejection  of 
sacrifice,  we  refer  the  reader  to  that  same  Note.  These 
striking  features  of  early  Christianity,  showing  forth,  here 
directly  and  there  indirectly,  a  decided,  uncompromising 
opposition  to  sacrifice,  point,  to  our  mind,  unmistakably  to^ 
Jesus  as  its  author  and  champion  within  Christianity.  From 
his  mouth  the  disciples  undoubtedly  inbibed  it.  And  stren- 
uously, too,  we  hold,  they  transmitted  and  propagated  it 
within  the  fold  of  the  crescent  Church. 

That  also  the  Nazarenes  had  adopted  Jesus'  antagonistic 
attitude  relative  to  sacrifice,  we  may  take  for  granted,  from 
our  safe  apprehension  of  this  sect  as  close  adherents  of  the 
Jesus-religion,  and  withal  on  the  ground  of  systematic  con- 
tinuity from  the  Master. 


[12) 


EXCURSUS  B. 


Religious  philosophy  as  the  seat  of  which  we  are  used  to 
regard  Alexandria,  had,  in  the  century  of  Jesus,  and  doubt- 
less already  in  the  two  previous  centuries,  occupied  itself  pre- 
eminently with  clearing  Scripture  by  speculative  methods 
of  the  anthropomorphic  personalism  of  the  Deity,  which  the 
plain  letter  of  its  numerous  passages  would  convey.  We 
may  divide  the  theories  of  the  Jewish  theosophists  on  this 
problem  into  three  classes.  The  one  was  Philo's,  which  we 
will  illustrate  immediately.  The  other  that  adopted  by 
the  Hellenistic  Jewish  Christians  of  the  type  of  Stephen 
and  Paul,  and  also  by  some  Gentile  Christian  Gnostics. 
The  third  that  of  the  Ebionites,  of  the  kind  to  which  the 
author  of  the  Clementine  Homilies  belonged,  who 
declared  all  anthropomorphic  expressions  and,  besides, 
those  parts  of  Scripture  incongruous  with  his  religious 
philosophy,  as  spurious. 

I.  philo's  position. 

Philo  was  both  as  to  his  metaphysical,  theistic  specula- 
tion and  that  upon  the  authority  of  the  Law,  in  striking 
variance  with  the  simple  orthodox  standpoint  held  by  the 
non-philosophical,  pious  Jews  of  his  age.  We  will  here  set 
forth  both  his  relative  views,  though  the  former  does  not 
directly  bear  on  our  present  subject.  It  will  yet  essentially 
aid  us  in  characterizing  that  celebrated  Alexandrian  Jew- 
ish philosopher. 

Philo  has  by  his  conception  of  God  as  the  Absolute,  and 
as  being  totally  abstracted  from  the  finite  world  and  out  of 
any  direct  relation  to  it,  practically  volatilized  almost  the 
entire  purport  of  the  Mosaic  dispensation.  His  specula- 
tive system  rested  mainly  on  the  then  dominating 
Platonism.  But  he  called  to  aid  also  the  Pythagorean 
numbers  and  other  notions  of  this  philosophical  school,  as 
well  as  various  Stoic  concepts.  The  name  of  his  Logos — 
standing  for  divine  Reason  or  Word — was  as  well  as  some 
other  of  his  theories  borrowed  from  the  Stoic  sect.  His 
aim  was  to  adapt  the  Hebrew  Scripture  to  the  flourishing 
Greek  philosophy  and  harmonize  both  with  each  other  by 
the  way  of  allegory,  just  as  the  renowned  medieval  philoso- 
pher, Maimoni,  attempted,  in  his  "  Moreh  Nebhuchim,"  to 
clothe  Mosaism  in  the  then  stylish  garb  of  Aristotelism  and 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY.  303 

Neo-Platonism.  To  remove  from  Scripture  interpretation 
all  traits  and  traces  of  human-like  action  of  God,  and  to 
insure  God's  absolute  unchangeableness  and  utter  distance 
from  the  material  world,  was  the  task  he,  the  same  as  other 
Jewish  religious  philosophers  before  and  after  him,  had  set 
himself  to.  In  order  to  it  he  invented,  or  rather  utilized, 
the  philosophical  theory  of  dynameis  "divine  powers," 
evolved  from,  and  kept  in  a  certain  continuous  reflux  to, 
God.  These  divine  powers  were  to  him  the  intermediate 
agents  between  the  Creator-Father  and  the  world  and 
mankind.  The  Logos  was  the  highest  of  them, — the  idea 
of  ideas,  the  archangel, — in  a  word,  their  original  complex. 
God  used  this  Logos,  Philo  theorizes,  in  creating  the  world 
(  Alleg.  iii.  31  ;  On  the  Cherubim,  xxxv  ;  Confus.  of  Lang., 
xiv.,  end  ).  While  other  celestial  powers  had  assisted  God 
in  making  man  (Creation  of  the  World,  xxiv.),  the  Logos 
remained  yet  the  chief  organ  of  God's  creation.  He  was 
nearest  to  God,  and  his  direct  image.  He  was  the  Father's 
"first-born  son  "  (  On  Dreams,  xxxvi  ;  On  the  Tilling  of  the 
Earth,  xii.),  or  his  "  eldest  son  "  (  Conf.  of  Lang.  xiv.).  He 
was  assigned  the  highest  rank  and  function  of  all  the  divine 
powers, — the  rank  of  the  archetypal  world-mind  and  great 
governor  of  the  cosmos,  "  being  in  a  manner  its  God  "  (  On 
the  Creation,  xxiii.) 

This  latter  quality  is,  indeed,  somewhat  reduced  again  in 
'  On  the  Tilling  of  the  Earth,'  xii.,  where  he  characterizes 
the  Logos  only  as  superintendent,  next  to  the  supreme 
governor,  God.  Yet  a  very  high  degree  of  divinity  Philo 
nevertheless  reserved  to  the  Logos.  This  appears  most 
readily  from  the  Fragment  preserved  by  Eusebius,  in  which 
he  is  pronounced  the  "  second  God."  The  genuineness  of 
this  passage  is  borne  out  by  another  in  Allegories,  ch. 
Ixxiii.,  where  Philo  speaks  of  the  Father  of  all  as  the  "  first " 
God,  and  of  the  Logos  as  inferior,  yet  sufficient  to  be  the 
ordinary,  imperfect  man's  divinity.  If  this  is  not  a  real 
sublimation  of  the  Logos  to  a  substantial  sameness,  nor 
even  a  nominal  identity,  with  God,  but  merely  an  hypostasis; 
especially  since,  as  Schmidt,  'Libellus,  etc'  argues,  the 
angels  too  are  by  Philo  denominated  Gods  :  it  can  yet  not 
be  gainsaid  that  such  daring  speculative  attempts  were 
fraught  with  serious  perils  to  true  Monotheism. 

No  matter  that  Philo  was  not  strictly  consistent  in  the 
divine  personification  of  the  Logos,  representing  him  about 
as  often  as  the  abstract  Reason-Word  of  God,  as  he 
attributes  to  him  a  distinct,  substantial  existence.  He  per- 
petrated none  the  less  a  grievous  departure  from  orthodox 
Judaism  in  those  places  where  he  does  personify  him.   Even 


304  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

where  he  presents  the  Logos  only  in  the  character  of  God's 
Reason,  the  impression  he  gives  us  is,  that  this  Reason  is 
in  some  manner  dissociated  from  God.  And  surely  is  such 
departure  noticeable  in  his  proposition,  that  service  is  due 
the  Logos  next  to  God  (see  Gfroerer,  'Prim.  Christ.,'  i.  p. 
272,  end).  Above  all  must  his  suggestion  be  pronounced 
an  irreconcilable  departure,  that  those  "having  knowledge 
of  the  one  God  are  properly  called  sons  of  God," — meaning 
thereby,  as  will  appear  from  the  following,  the  knowing 
ones  or  Gnostics.  True,  he  has  immediately  after  restricted 
the  sweep  of  this  theory,  saying  that  none  may  so  far  have 
attained  that  perfect  wisdom  and  goodness  which  yields 
that  title.  Nay,  from  his  further  remark,  that  one  should 
at  least  endeavor  to  be  adorned  with  the  name  "son  of  the 
Logos,"  we  should  judge  that  he  meant,  that  no  ordinarily 
aspiring  wise  man  (be  he  even  of  Philo's  philosophical 
acumen  and  ethical  refinement  ! )  can  well  succeed  in  reach- 
ing the  state  in  which  he  may  justly  bear  the  name  "son  of 
God."  But  has  he  not  at  all  events  allowed  the  possibility 
of  reaching  it,  how  late  soever  in  a  wise  and  holy  man's  life 
this  might  be  .-'  Has  he  not,  by  avowing  that  virtually  a 
man  out  of  thousands  may  reach  it, — deducing  this  even 
from  a  pretended  Scriptural  indication, —  opened  the  door 
to  claimants  of  it,  whose  grade  of  perfection  would  not  only 
rest  on  the  lofty  self-consciousness  of  the  individual,  but  on 
a  popular  assenting  and  sanctioning  vote  .>'  [For  further 
information  of  the  reader  about  Philo's  theory  on  the  ideal 
man,  we  refer  to  Allegories,  Ixxiii.,  where  he  brings  forward 
the  sentence  that  "the  imperfect  ( i.  e.  the  average  aspirers 
after  wisdom  and  goodness)  may  be  content  with  having 
the  name  of  God  ( identical  with  the  Logos)  as  their  God  ; 
it  is  only  the  wise  and  perfect  who  can  have  the  'firs^' 
(that  is,  God,  the  invisible  Father  of  all)  as  their  God." 
Compare  also  Migration  of  Abraham,  ch.  xxxi.,  where  the 
Logos  is  assigned  to  the  imperfect  man  as  his  divine  guide, 
until  iie  have  achieved  the  "  highest  wisdom,"  when  he,  hav- 
ing caught  up  with  the  Logos  himself,  will  be  his  peer,  and 
"  both  together  become  attendants  of  the  All-guide,  God."] 
That  such  theories  advanced,  we  own,  with  great  rever- 
ence to  the  God  of  Israel,  but  nevertheless  impairing  his 
character  as  rendered  in  Scripture,  must  have  been  held  as 
heterodox  by  all  Palestinian  orthodox  Israelites  who  should 
have  heard  them,  will  readily  be  conceded.  That  his 
"divine  powers"  must  have  appeared  to  them  as  strongly 
tinctured  with  a  sort  of  compromise  with  the  ethnical 
polytheism,  is  likely  enough.  At  any  rate  must  he  by  his 
Logos-doctrine  have  laid  himself  open  to  the  suspicion  of 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISIORV.  305 

ditheism  or  diarchy,  in  the  same  manner  that  the  later 
heresiarch,  Elisha  ben  Abuyah,  was  suspected  of  ditheism 
for  his  Gnostic  attachment  and  the  construction  of  the 
IMetathron  of  Jewish  mysticism — the  cognate  of  the  Logos, 
comp.  Philo's  Migration  of  Abraham,  xxxi.,  towards  end, 
with  B.  Synhedrin,  38,  3,  towards  end — into  a  second  God  ; 
see  on  this  B.  Chagigah,  f.  I5-  We  know  that  Philo  was 
all  along  emphatically  affirming  the  unity  of  God,  whom  he 
has,  moreover,  in  divergence  from  Plato,  positively  hypos- 
tasized  and  exalted  above  the  latter's  God,  who  was  merely 
the  Idea  of  the  good  ;  see  on  this  Schmidt,  as  above,  and 
comp.  DoelHnger,  "Gentile  and  Jew,"  etc.  But  his  theoso- 
phy  nevertheless  partook  as  much  of  pagan  philosophy  as 
of  Jewish  religious  belief.  He  made  such  vast  conces- 
sions to  the  former,  that  it  can  never  be  claimed  for  him 
that  he  was  an  exponent  of  the  pure  Jewish  Monotheism,  as 
bodied  forth  in  Scripture  and  conceived  by  his  orthodox 
contemporaries.  He  was  assuredly,  if  not  the  only  one,  at 
least  one  of  the  theoretical  originators  of  Gnosticism,  that 
proved  so  baneful  alike  to  Judaism  and  Christianity.  And 
we  truly  believe  that,  had  his  theosophical  theories  come 
to  the  cognizance  of  the  orthodox  Palestinian  authorities, 
he  would  have  promptly  been  denounced  by  them  as 
heterodox  and  branded  with  the  stigma  of  '  Minean,'  his 
outward  pious  conformation  to  traditional  Judaism  and 
fervid  Jewish  national  attachment  notwithstanding. 

That  in  a  system  like  Philo's,  in  which  God's  rigid 
abstractedness  from  the  material  world  was  taught  with  such 
emphatic  assertion,  and  the  great-power,  Logos,  devised  to 
be  the  active  link  between  God  and  men,  a  legislation  for 
Israel  by  Jehovah  had  very  little  or  no  room  at  all,  is  thus 
easily  recognizable.  Indeed  has  he  accorded  direct  promul- 
gation by  God  only  to  the  Ten  Commandments.  The  rest  of 
the  Mosaic  enactments  were  to  him  enunciated  directly  by 
Moses.  They  were  "divine  oracles,"  it  is  true.  But  they 
were  such  only  by  virtue  of  inspiration.  For,  as  he  urges 
with  reference  to  the  delivery  of  the  Decalogue,  "let  no 
such  idea  ever  enter  your  mind  that  God  was  himself  utter- 
ing some  kind  of  voice."  Those  oracles  he  divides  into 
three  classes  :  the  one,  in  which  Moses  acted  as  interpreter 
of  God,  delivering  the  decisions  himself,  though  the 
Pentateuch  attributes  this  act  to  God  ;  the  second,  put  in 
the  form  of  questions  and  answers  between  God  and  Moses  ; 
the  third,  constituting  by  far  the  largest  body  of  precepts, 
which  were  "  delivered  by  Moses  in  his  own  character  as  a 


306  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

divinely  prompted  lawgiver,  possessed  by  divine  inspira- 
tion "  (On  the  life  of  Moses,  xxiii.),  or,  as  he  gives  it  at 
another  place,  "  the  lawgiver,  who  is  a  prophetic  spirit  " 
(On  the  Festivals,  vii.). 

It  is  only  to  the  Decalogue  that  he  awards  a  sort  of  really 
divine  authority.  Its  revelation  was  accomplished,  he  pro- 
poses in  *  On  the  Ten  Commandments,'  ch.  ix.,  by  a  new 
creation.  God  brought  forth  an  "  invisible  sound  "in  the 
air,  animate  with  a  "rational  soul."  This  "sounded  forth  a 
voice  like  a  breath  passing  through  a  trumpet."  It  was  a 
"visible  voice,''  as  he  sets  forth  in  '  On  the  Life  of  Moses,'  ch. 
xxvii.,  "  which  affected  the  eyes  of  those  who  were  present 
even  more  than  their  ears."  These  eyes  were,  however, 
not  those  of  the  body,  but  "  of  the  soul,"  as  he  asserts  in 
'Migration  of  Abraham,'  ch.  ix.,  pressing  there,  moreover, 
the  literal  sense  of  some  figurative  expressions  of  the 
Pentateuch  for  his  purpose  of  illustrating,  that  the  voice 
of  God  giving  forth  the  Ten  Words  was  not  one  of  a 
material  nature,  but  "a  most  exceedingly  brilliant  ray  of 
virtue,  not  different  in  any  respect  from  the  source  of 
reason."  The  gist  of  all  these  reasonings  is,  that  on  the 
occasion  of  the  delivery  of  the  Ten  Words  it  was  the 
rational  soul  specially  created  by  God,  that  communicated 
them  to  the  rational  souls  or  minds  of  the  then  assembled 
Israelites.  The  revelation  of  the  Decalogue  was,  then,  a 
totally  immaterial  act.  And  it  was  too  the  only  portion 
of  the  Mosaic  code  that  "  God  had  uttered  without  the 
intervention  of  the  prophet  "  (comp.  '  On  the  Life  of  Moses,' 
1.  c). 

II. 

Another  class  of  religious  philosophers  of  the  days  of 
Philo  and  Jesus,  attributed  all  the  announcements  and 
commands  of  the  Mosaic  code  to  angels.  This  angelic 
authority  was  resorted  to  from  the  same  motive  that 
animated  Philo, —  to  avert  from  the  supreme  God  every 
anthropomorphic  and  anthropopathic  imputation.  Philo, 
however,  had  yet  for  all  his  denial  of  the  immediate  Divine 
authority  of  all  the  Mosaic  laws  but  the  Decalogue,  rever- 
ently ascribed  at  least  an  indirect  divineness  and  religious 
obligation  to  all  of  them.  He  had,  for  all  his  love  for 
allegory  which  he  had  elevated  above  the  material  meaning 
of  the  letter  of  the  Law  (calling  the  former  the  soul  and 
the  latter  the  body),  urged  with  sincere  piety  the  practical 
observance  of  all  of  them,  warning  seriously  against  their 
omission  in  the  proud  self-sufficiency,  which  the  wise  might 
feel  in  the  speculative  process  of  symbolical  interpretation. 


THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORV.  307 

An  entirely  different  set  were  those  who  assigned  the 
whole  Mosaic  legislation  to  angels.  In  the  case  where 
angels  were  given  out  as  the  real  authors,  the  unalterable 
obligation  of  its  laws  was  surely  out  of  the  question.  One 
of  these  men,  Paul,  had,  indeed,  come  to  teach  the  total 
abrogation  of  the  Mosaic  Law.  There  was  consistency,  too, 
in  such  negative  position.  For,  why  should  commands 
coming  from  angels  have  binding  force  for  men  who  have 
rational  souls  like  them,  though  of  some  degrees  below 
theirs?  Among  that  class  are  to  be  numbered  Stephen 
and  Paul,  as  also  some  of  the  Christianizing  Gnostics  of 
Samaritan,  Jewish,  and  Gentile  descent. 

Stephen  gives  out  "  the  angel  "  as  having  spoken  to  Moses 
on  Sinai,  imparting  to  him  the  "  living  words"  for  Israel 
(Acts  vii.  38).  This  angel  was  doubtless  to  represent  the 
"  Elohim "  in  Ex.  xx.  i.  In  v.  53  of  the  same  chapter 
Stephen  reproaches  all  Israel,  alike  of  the  past  and  the 
present,  with  disobeying  the  Law  which  they  received 
"according  to  the  commands  of  the  angels."  The  plural 
is  here  probably  used  because  he  alludes  to  all  the  ordi- 
nances of  the  Law,  and  not  only  to  the  Decalogue  ;  they 
being  manifold,  may  have  been  thought  by  him  as  having  a 
variety  of  angels  for  authors,  or,  at  least,  promulgators. 
Corresponding  to  Stephen's  phraseology  is  that  employed 
by  his  doctrinal  successor,  Paul.  In  Gal.  iii.  20,  he  reflects 
on  the  Law  as  "  commanded  (or  appointed)  by  angels,  in 
the  hand  of  a  mediator"  (i.  e.  Moses). 

L^nderlying  these  expressions  was  indubitably  the  philo- 
sophical notion,  that  God  must  not  be  degraded  to  the  rank 
of  human-like  lawgivers.  His  enunciation  of  commands  as 
represented  in  the  Pentateuch,  had  consequently  to  be  cor- 
rected into  the  perception,  that  they  had  an  angelic  origin. 
The  philosophical  theorists  who  brought  out  that  notion 
may,  we  suggest,  have  drawn  a  support  for  it  from  the 
peculiar  translation  by  the  Septuagint  of  the  last  part  of  v. 
2,  ch.  xxxiii.  of  Deuteronomy  into  :  "  from  his  right  hand 
angels  with  him."  This  was  indeed  a  radical  alteration  of 
our  transmitted  Hebrew  text.  We  are  at  a  loss  to  account 
for  it,  or  even  only  to  guess  at  the  corresponding  words 
which  the  sages  composing  the  Greek  version  had  in  their 
own  original  text.  This  decided  variance  of  the  Septuagint 
had  yet  not  struck  the  Grecian  Jewish  philosophers  of  those 
latter  days  as  anything  abnormal  and  strange.  For  to 
them  the  Hebrew  original  was  mostly  a  sealed  book,  and 
the  Septuagint  version  the  all-sufficient,  venerable  oracle. 
Well  can  it,  then,  be  supposed  that  they  discovered  in  that 
translation    a   confirmation    of  their   anti-anthropomorphic 


308  THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

apprehension,  that  it  was  only  spirits,  and  not  God  him- 
self, who  imparted  to  Moses  the  sacred  enactments.  [  We 
deem  it  proper  to  refute  at  this  place  the  opinion  of  those 
modern  writers  who  rank  the  passage  of  Josephus.  Ant.  xv. 
5,  3,  with  those  others  purporting  to  represent  angels  as 
promulgators  of  the  Law.  Josephus  reproduces  there  a 
speech  delivered  by  Herod  before  a  Jewish  multitude,  in 
which  he  among  other  things  exalts  the  dignity  of  ambassa- 
dors, arguing:  "we  ourselves  having  learned  the  most 
excellent  of  our  doctrines  and  the  most  holy  things  con- 
tained in  our  laws  '  through  angels  from  God.'  "  It  is  posi- 
tively a  gross  error  to  think  here  of  real  angels.  Herod 
merely  alluded  to  prophets  as  ambassadors  of  God,  being 
such  either  by  direct  appointment,  or  by  m^ans  of  inspira- 
tion ;  compare  on  the  latter.  Against  Apion,  i.  7.  We  hold, 
farther,  that  if  the  word  "  laws  "  in  that  speech  is  to  be 
taken  strictly,  in  the  sense  of  Mosaic,  the  speaker  may 
have  referred  to  Moses  and  Aaron  and,  possibly,  to  other 
pious  ancestors  anterior  to  them,  whose  utterances  are 
recorded  in  the  Pentateuch,  and  this  in  the  point  of  view 
of  their  having  been  messengers  of  God  ;  compare  Ps.  cv. 
17,  26.  If  Scripture  at  large  be  meant  by  the  term  "  laws," 
then,  we  propose,  all  the  accredited  prophets  occurring 
therein  are  readily  suggested  as  objects  of  that  allusion 
made  by  Herod.  The  same  meaning  oi propJiets  we  assign 
to  the  "angels"  in  Ep.  Hebr.  ii.  2.  Not  that  this  Pauline 
epistolator  was  not  capable  of  bodying  forth  the  heterodox 
philosophical  notion  of  angels  having  been  the  promulga- 
tors of  the  Mosaic  Law.  By  no  means.  But  the  context 
does  not  require  such  construction  being  put  on  the  word. 
Contrasting  that  passage  with  ch.  i.  verse  1 1,  we  find  it  more 
reasonable  to  suppose  that  he  referred  there  to  prophets, 
too,  as  having  delivered  the  divine  appointments  to  the 
Israelites.  The  prophets,  then,  he  called  angels,  in  the 
sense  of  messengers  of  God  to  men.] 

We  will  now  produce  some  corresponding  views  on  the 
origin  of  the  Mosaic  Law,  held  by  Gnostics  properly  so 
called,  that  is,  those  Christianizing  religious  philosophers 
whom  the  Church  denounced  as  execrable  heretics.  It  is 
well  known  that  they  assumed  more  than  one  God,  lower- 
ing the  Demiurgus  (Creator,  or,  rather.  Fabricator  or 
Fashioner)  of  Plato  and  Philo  to  a  degree  below  the  supreme 
God,  the  Father.  We  cannot  here  enter  in  detail  on  the 
question  of  how  much  of  Gnosticism  there  was  virtually 
adopted  by  Paul  in  view  of  his  supernal  Christ,  or  by  Philo 
with  regard  to  his  highly  exalted  Logos.  We  will  only  say 
in  brief,  that   Philo   has   at   all  events  never  transferred  the 


THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY.  3O9 

title  Demiurgus  from  God  to  the  Logos.  Whereas  Paul 
held  forth  his  Christ  as  the  Creator  proper  of  all  things, 
visible  and  invisible,  by  the  side  of  the  "  invisible  God,"  in 
Col.  i.  16;  comp.  I  Cor.  viii.  6.  (Possibly,  however,  Paul 
attributed  to  his  Christ,  the  Son,  even  in  the  former  pas- 
sage, no  more  than  the  same  dignity  which  Philo  did  to  his 
Logos, — that  he  was  the  instrument  of  the  creation  of  this 
world.  Not  only  does  the  contradistinction  he  employs  in 
the  latter-quoted  passage  admit  that  he  pointed  out  such 
a  perception  ;  but  Philo,  in  his  "Allegories,"  i.  13,  and  'On 
the  Cherubim.'  xxxv.,  offers  an  analogy  by  which  that  sup- 
position gains  a  fair  support.  Philo  distinguishes  there 
between  "hypo"  and  "  dia,"  in  connection  with  the  Divine 
creation.  His  view,  taking  the  one  passage  with  the  other, 
is,  that  the  latter  preposition  is  expressive  of  immediate 
production  by  God,  whilst  the  former  denotes  only  God's 
causation.  Similarly  may  Paul  have  meant  to  convey  by 
"dia  autou  "  in  the  just  quoted  passages  no  other  idea  than 
that  Christ  was  the  instrument  of  the  creation,  and  by  "  ex 
hou "  in  Cor.  1.  c.  no  other  than  what  Philo  implies 
in  "hypo"  as  relating  to  the  Creator-Father,  viz.,  that  he 
was  the  cause  of  all  things).  Thus  he  had  no  right  to 
inveigh,  in  Tim.  vi.  20,  against  the  false  Gnosis  as  com- 
pared with  his  own,  which  he  claimed  to  be  the  only  true 
one  ;  see  i  Cor.  viii.  7.  For,  strictly  considered,  there  was 
very  little  difference  between  the  Gnostics  so  called,  who 
were  decried  as  heretics  for  holding  a  Creator  distinct  from 
the  absolute  Principle,  God,  and  himself  He  too  invested 
his  Christ  with  the  title  of  Creator, — though  at  the  same 
time  nominally  avowing  the  "one  God,  the  Father"  (Cor., 
as  before). 

Now  as  to  those  Gnostics  we  will  say,  that  Simon 
of  Gitta,  in  Samaria,  nicknamed  the  Magician,  who 
is  by  the  Church  fathers  treated  as  the  originator  of 
heretical  Christianizing  Gnosticism,  is  by  Hippolytus,  Ref. 
Haer.  vi.  14,  credited  with  asserting,  that  "the  angels  who 
created  the  world,  made  whatever  enactments  they  pleased." 
The  origin  of  the  Mosaic  Law  was  thus  attributed  to  angels. 
To  this  Samaritan  school  of  Gnostics  belong  Menander, 
Saturnilus,  and  Basilides,  all  of  whom  held  about  the  same 
doctrine.  The  two  last-named,  flourishing  in  the  earlier 
part  of  the  second  century  C.  E.,  assumed  next  to  the  first 
Principle,  God,  seven  world-making  angelic  gods,  one  of 
whom  was  the  God  of  the  Jews  and  of  the  Hebrew  Script- 
ure.    Basilides    called    this    Divinity    the    Archon    (or,    as 


310  THE   SABBATH   IN   HISTORY. 

Hippolytus  represents  it,  one  of  the  two  Archons,  of  whom 
the  first  ruled  from  Adam  to  Moses,  and  the  second  from 
Moses  onward).  To  all  of  these  Gnostics  the  Mosaic 
enactments  were  of  angelic  origin. 

Of  Jewish  Christian  Gnostics  who  had  embraced  the  same 
view,  Cerinthus  is  to  be  mentioned.  He  was  schooled  in 
Alexandria,  and  flourished  in  Asia  Minor  in  the  latter  part 
of  the  first  century  C.  E.  According  to  a  number  of  mod- 
ern Church  authorities  he  was  the  first  of  the  real  heretical 
Gnostics.  He  taught  that  the  material  world  was  created 
by  angels,  and  that  the  God  of  the  Hebrew  Scripture,  at 
the  same  time  the  God  of  Israel,  was  one  of  them.  Some 
ancient  Church  writers  state  about  him,  that  he  held  angels 
in  general  as  the  authors  of  the  Mosaic  Law. 

There  is  in  this  connection  to  be  noted  a  Gentile  Chris- 
tianizing Gnostic  of  Marcion's  school,  Apelles.  Marcion 
was  notoriously  the  fiercest  of  all  the  enemies  of  orthodox 
Christianity,  alike  the  Jewish  and  Gentile  portion  of  it.  He 
assumed  two  co-eternal  and  opposite  principles,  the  supreme, 
good  God  and  the  Demiurgus — the  latter  imperfect  and  the 
God  of  the  Old  Testament,  which  Testament  he  contempt- 
uously rejected  besides.  Jesus  he  set  down  as  a  mere  sem- 
blance, but  Christ  3:6  the  revealer  of  the  new  Deity,  the  true, 
supreme  God,  the  Father.  Apelles  was  his  most  promi- 
nent disciple.  He  aimed  to  soften  the  harsh  dualism  of  the 
master  by  making  of  the  Demiurgus  a  celebrated  angel, 
brought  forth  by  the  supreme,  good  God.  He  also  taught 
a  third  God  or  superior  angel,  of  fiery  nature,  who  was  the 
God  of  Israel  and  of  the  Law  ;  see  Hilgenfeld,  Hist,  of 
Heret.,  etc.,  p.  536. 

In  all  the  above  instances  the  theory  is  maintained  that 
the  Mosaic  dispensation  came  from  angels.  Greatly  differ- 
ent from  one  another  as  the  general  doctrinal  positions  of 
all  those  personages  were,  there  is  yet  one  common  original 
cause  to  be  upheld  for  that  theory — that  God  must  be 
regarded  as  totally  divided  from  the  world  of  sense,  and  as 
having  no  contact  and  communication  with  men. 

III. 

A  specimen  of  a  third  position  on  the  origin  of  the  Mosaic 
Law  is  held  forth  in  the  pseudo-Clementine  literature.  It 
is  of  Ebionite  origin,  of  about  the  middle  of  the  second 
century  C.  E.  The  polemics  set  forth  therein  is  supposably 
in  the  main  directed  against  Marcion,  yet  partly  also 
against  Paul,  and  this  in  a  disguised  and  indistinct  con- 
junction with  the  above-named  arch-heretic,  Simon  of 
Gitta.     Baur,  "  The  Christian   Gnosis,"  classes  the  pseudo- 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  3 II 

Clementine  system,  too,  under  the  name  of  Gnostic,  rang- 
ing it  as  the  Judaizing  form  of  the  (Christian)  Gnosis. 
Ebionism,  that  is.  Christian  Essenism,  is  in  modern  days 
admitted  to  be  the  ground-tone  of  those  writings. 

In  the  Homilies  God  is  stanchly  defended  as  the 
real,  onlj'  Creator.  Rigid  Monarchist  as  their  author 
was,  he  would  not,  like  Philo,  introduce  the  Logos  or  the 
Wisdom  as  the  instrument  in  creating  the  world.  For 
polemical  argument's  sake,  it  is  true,  he  once  averred  that 
Wisdom — a  half-impersonated  divine  power  of  the  kind  of 
Philo's  Logos — assisted  God  in  creating  man.  But  on  the 
whole  he  adhered  to  the  orthodox  Jewish  standpoint  in 
regard  to  the  creation  of  the  world.  He  pronounced  the 
four  elements — the  original  component  parts  of  this  world 
— as  generated  by  God.  Unlike  the  Platonic  Philo  who 
held  matter  pre-existent,  he,  on  the  contrary,  avowed  it 
originally  created  by  God.  For  it  was  to  him  not  at  all 
incongruous  with  the  sublime  idea  of  God,  to  believe  him 
coming  in  contact  with  matter. 

Yet  for  all  this  firm  monotheistic  attitude,  he  was  most 
radically  heterodox  as  to  the  authority  and  venerableness 
of  the  Pentateuch  and  Scripture  in  general.  He  put  up 
a  distinction  between  a  primitive  religion  which  was 
even  anterior  to  Adam,  and  the  later  Mosaic.  The 
Mosaic  religion  he  declares  as  a  mixture  of  true  and  false 
things.  The  true  things  are,  he  argues,  "from  the  tradition 
of  Moses."  He  was  a  true  prophet  and  the  prophet  of 
truth.  (Prophecy  is,  by  the  way,  extremely  exalted  by 
our  author,  in  a  genuine  Pythagorean-Essenic  manner.) 
He  was  continuously  possessed  of  the  spirit  of  God,  as  were 
Adam,  Noah,  Enoch,  Abraham,  Isaac.  Jacob,  and,  after 
these,  Christ,  in  whom,  again,  the  prophetical  Spirit  of  all 
of  those  saints  was  collectively  united. 

Moses,  he  further  theorizes,  gave  the  law  of  God,  "by 
the  order  of  God  and  with  explanations,"  without  writing, 
to  seventy  men,  to  be  handed  down  to  posterity.  [It  is 
curious  to  note  the  "  mystery  of  initiation "  by  which, 
according  to  the  alleged  letter  of  Peter  to  James  attached 
to  the  Homilies,  those  seventy  men  were  in  the  mystical 
Essenic-Ebionite  sphere  represented  to  have  received  that 
law.  They  had  to  stand  by  the  living  water,  it  is  asserted 
there  (water  was  so  loftily  rated  by  the  Ebionites,  because 
they  claimed  that  it  received  its  motion  from  the  Spirit, 
and  this,  again,  had  his  origin  from  God),  and  "  not  to 
swear,  for  that  is  unlawful,  but  to  adjure  and  say  :  '  I  take 
to  witness  heaven,  earth,  water,  in  which  all  things  are 
comprehended,  and  in  addition  to  all  these,  the  air  also  which 


312  THE   SABBATH   IN    HISTORY. 

pervades  all  things,  etc'  "  This  impresses  us,  in  passing, 
as  having  been  the  usual  Essenic  adjuration,  in  the  place 
of  oaths  prohibited  with  them.  ]  But  after  Moses  was 
taken  up,  it  was  written  by  some  one,  "  the  wicked  one 
having  dared  to  work  this."  (By  the  wicked  one  the  evil 
Spirit  is  meant,  to  whom,  as  our  authors  further  doctrine 
was,  God  had  assigned  the  rule  over  this  world  and  also  the 
punitive  jurisdiction  over  men.)  It  was  not  written  by 
Moses.  For  how  could  he  himself  have  noted  down  that 
he  died  ?  About  five  hundred  years  after  him  the  Law  was 
found  lying  in  the  Temple,  and  about  five  hundred  years 
more  it  was  carried  away  and  burnt  in  the  time  of  Nebuch- 
adnezzar (compare  as  to  the  latter  notion  the  apocryphal 
Fourth  Book  of  Ezra,  xiv.  2i,  where  this  holy  man  is  made 
to  reply  to  God  :  "  For  thy  law  is  burnt,  therefore  no  one 
knows  thy  deeds  of  the  past  or  of  the  future."). 

How  much  of  all  this  fantastic  theory  belonged  already 
to  the  earlier  Ebionites,  is  very  difficult  to  trace  out.  In 
substance,  we  incline  to  think,  it  reaches  back  to  them. 
And  we  farther  believe,  that  the  Essenes  were  not  alien 
to  it,  either. 

As  to  the  written  Mosaic  Law  which  our  author  pro- 
nounced as  containing  confusedly  true  and  false  things,  he 
put,  concerning  its  true  and  genuine  parts,  in  the  mouth  of 
Peter  the  affirmation,  that  "  God  had  a  written  law  from 
Moses  to  the  present  times"  (Hom.  xviii.  3).  These  parts 
were  to  him,  then,  in  a  sense.  Divine.  They  were  in  his 
mind  presumably  the  Decalogue  (minus  the  third  com- 
mandment, to  be  sure),  and  all  those  other  Mosaic  precepts 
which  the  Essenes  had  held  obligatory,  modified  though  to 
the  religious  views  and  practice  of  Jesus. 

The  direction  of  Jesus,  the  prophet  and  teacher,  our 
author  religiously  maintains,  is  wJioUy  to  be  followed.  It 
was,  in  general,  that  one  should  use  his  own  judgment  as 
regards  Scriptural  sayings, —  an  imputation  to  Jesus  which 
he  attempts  to  verify  by  his  (alleged)  admonition  :  "  Be  ye 
prudent  money-changers."  Jesus,  he  argues,  had  himself 
admitted  the  existence  of  false  things  in  Scripture.  He 
bases  this  assumption  on  Matt.  xxii.  29,  where  his  reading 
was  :  "  Not  knowing  the  true  things  of  the  Scriptures," 
instead  of  the  canonical,  "  not  knowing  the  Scriptures." 
This,  he  contends,  is  further  proved  by  the  circumstance, 
that  Jesus  had  once  declared,  "  I  am  not  come  to  destroy 
the  law,"  and  that  he  had  yet  appeared  to  be  destroying  it. 
By  this  seeming  contradiction  the  prophet-teacher,  Jesus, 
intimated,  so  he  concludes,  that  the  things  which  he  did 
destroy  had  not  belonged  to  the  Law. 


THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY.  313 

And  now  our  Ebionite  author  goes  on  to  prove  from 
Jesus'  utterances,  what  the  respective  true  and  false  parts 
of  the  Mosaic  Law  are.  That  sacrificial  ordinances  were 
not  included  in  its  original  composition,  he  tries  to  support 
by  Jesus'  saying:  "The  heaven  and  the  earth  shall  pass 
away,  etc."  (Matt.  v.  18  ),  arguing  therefrom  that,  as  sacri- 
fices had  ( at  his  own  time  )  actually  ceased,  they  must  not 
have  formed  part  of  the  Law  of  the  God-inspired  Moses, 
but  been  added  later.  To  show  that  the  sacrificial  ritual 
was  interpolated,  he  refers,  besides,  to  Jesus'  saying  in 
Matt.  ix.  13. 

Against  the  insinuation  that  God  swears,  instances  of 
which  occur  in  Scripture,  he  produces  Jesus'  admonition  : 
"  Let  your  j'ea  be  yea,  etc."  Against  the  Scriptural  imputa- 
tion that  God  tempts,  he  holds  out  Jesus'  assertion  ( not  to 
be  found  though  in  the  extant  gospels):  "The  tempter 
is  the  wicked  one."  False  things  in  Scripture  are  to  him 
also  the  representations,  that  Adam  was  ignorant,  or  a 
transgressor  of  God's  command,  for  he  was,  in  his  view, 
•'the  sinless,  true  prophet  of  God;"  or  that  Noah  got  drunk; 
that  Abraham  had  three  wives,  and  Jacob  four,  two  of 
whom,  besides,  sisters;  that  Moses  slew  a  man,  or  once 
accepted  advice  from  an  idol-priest,  etc. 

False  are  to  him,  in  fine,  any  statements  of  Scripture 
attributing  to  God,  directly  or  by  implication,  any  evil  or 
want  of  foreknowledge,  ignorance,  reflection,  repentance, — 
all  of  which  misconceptions  must  positively  be  cleared  off 
from  man's  apprehension  of  the  Deity. 

According  to  all  the  foregoing,  we  have  to  judge  that  the 
volume  of  the  Mosaic  code  of  our  Ebionite  author,  after 
being  purged  of  the  many  portions  which  were  to  him 
ungenuine,  had  very  diminutive  proportions,  indeed.  And 
so  there  were  likewise,  in  his  system,  very  few  of  the  ritual- 
istic laws,  to  which  he  assigned  a  truly  Mosaic  origin  and 
Divine  inspiration  and,  consequently,  perpetually  obligatory 
force.     Which  these  were,  this  we  cannot  discuss  here. 

Concerning  the  primitive,  unwritten  law  of  God.  our 
author  has  not  left  us  entirely  in  obscurity  as  to  what 
he  had  decided  to  be  such.  He  meant  by  it  that  law, 
"illustrated  by  God's  creation,"  namely,  that  "there  is 
one  God  and  Creator  whom  man  has  to  love  and  fear,  and 
for  whose  sake  he  has  to  be  righteous  and  kind  to  his 
fellow-men,  as  thereby  he  honors  God's  image  :  man." 
This  is  evidently  the  moral  law  of  the  natural  religion. 
That  he  construed  the  primitive  law  as  such,  we  deduce 
especially  from  a  passage  in  Hom.  viii.  10,  where  he  pro- 
poses :     "God   having  made  all  things    well,    and    having 


314  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

handed  them  over  to  man...  ,  appointed  a  perpetual  law 
to  all,  which  neither  can  be  abrogated  by  enemies,  nor 
is  vitiated  by  any  impious  one,  nor  is  concealed  in  any 
place."  That  this  perpetual  law  was  to  him  no  other 
than  the  moral,  appears  yet  from  another  point  of  his 
Homilies,  viii.  27:  "the  will  of  the  righteous  One  is,  that 
you  do  no  wrong ;  that  is,  murder,  hatred,  envy  and  such 
like." 


EXCURSUS  C. 


To  supplement  our  proposition  advanced  in  that  disserta- 
-tion,  we  will  remark  that  it  was  not  at  all  alien  to  the  Sad- 
ducean  party  to  judicially  proceed  against  accused  persons 
by  way  of  deduction  from  Mosaic  ordinances,  and  of  logical 
combination.  For  all  their  noted  literalism  which,  accord- 
ing to  Megillath  Taanith,  they  applied  also  in  cases  falling 
under  the  head  of  the  Mosaic  retaliation  laws,  they  yet 
used  their  own  discretion  in  interpreting  various  judicial 
appointments  of  the  Mosaic  code,  going  at  times  even 
beyond  the  rigid  letter  of  the  Law.  This  does  not  only 
appear  from  the  chapter  of  that  Megillah  in  which  the  Sad- 
ducean  codified  "book  of  decisions"  is  characterized  as  con- 
taining classified  sections  for  cases  requiring  capital 
punishment,  "for  which  they  could,  however,  not  bring 
forward  any  evidence  from  the  Torah  ;  "  but  is  attested  by 
the  following  instance  which  may  be  regarded  as  typical  of 
their  whole  juridical  course. 

Josephus  relates  in  Ant.  xiii.  10,  6,  the  conflict  of  John 
Hyrcanus  with  the  Pharisees  ;  see  the  details  there.  We 
find  in  that  representation  the  Sadducees  disposed  to 
inflict  capital  punishment  for  an  offence  to  which,  how- 
ever, the  Law  had  attached  no  penal  visitation;  see  Exodus 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  315 

xxii.  27.  This  instance  does  not  only  clearly  exhibit  the 
Sadducees  as  "very  rigid  in  judging  offenders  above  all  the 
rest  of  the  Jews"  (Ant.  xx.  9,  i  ),  but  even  as  arbitrary 
tyrants  in  judgment. 

What  wonder,  then,  that  the  Pharisees  rejoiced  and 
established  a  feast  for  the  day  on  which  they  succeeded, 
under  the  queen  Salome  Alexandra,  in  abolishing  the 
Sadducean  "book  of  decisions .'' "  It  was  doubtless  replete 
with  self-construed  points  of  judicial  law,  and  contained  in 
particular  many  provisions  of  severe  penalties  even  on 
those  transgressions,  to  which  the  Mosaic  code  had  annexed 
no  deterrent  threat  of  penal  visitation.  Possibly  that 
Draconian  book  was  re-introduced  when  they,  after  Herod 
had  slain  the  Synhedrin,  regained  more  and  more  the 
ascendency  and  certainly  the  majority  in  the  national 
senate,  in  which  indeed  they  sustained  themselves  from 
thence  till  the  latter  days  of  the  State.  (At  the  time  of 
Herod's  trial  before  the  Synhedrin,  this  body  were  yet  for 
the  most  part,  it  seems,  composed  of  Pharisees.  This  may 
be  inferred  from  the  ultimate  assent  of  the  whole  Synhedrin 
to  the  opinion  of  the  Pharisee,  Sameas,  that  Herod  was 
liable  to  the  penalty  of  death ;  see  Ant.  xiv.  9,  5  )• 
Especially  can  such  revival  of  that  book  be  presumed  from 
the  time  when  the  political  government  was  ultimately 
taken  entirely  from  the  hands  of  independent  Jewish  rulers, 
and  exercised  by  imperially  appointed  procurators.  With 
this  epoch  the  Sadducean  power  and  prestige  in  the  Syn- 
hedrin must  have  markedly  increased,  probably  suffering 
no  essential  diminution  even  in  the  few  years  of  the  reign 
of  Agrippa  I. 

It  is  consequently  also  possible  that  the  severe  judg- 
ments inflicted  on  some  Jewish  Christians  after  Jesus, 
were  chiefly  due  to  the  excessive  rigor  the  Sadducees 
exhibited  in  the  execution  of  penal  laws.  For,  as  to  the 
Pharisees  in  the  national  council,  it  occurs  to  us  that,  what- 
ever participation  is,  according  to  the  N.  T.  sources  (see 
Matt.  xxi.  45,  46  ;  xxii.  15,  16;  xxvii.  62),  to  be  assigned  to 
them  in  the  doom  of  Jesus,  they  manifested  in  all  other 
accusations  of  Jewish  Christians  that  judicial  moderation 
and  leniency  which  are  variously  attested  of  them.  Jesus' 
cause  with  its  complex  nature  of  aggravation,  alike  Jewish 
religious  and  Jewish  national,  or  rather  political,  may  have 
appeared  to  the  Phariseic  members  of  the  Synhedrin  too 
exceptional,  not  to  co-operate  with  the  Sadducean  majority 
in  his  prosecution.  Apart  from  that  objective  aggravation, 
Jesus  had  given  the  Pharisees  ample  cause  for  personal 
•offence,  nay  animosity,  against  him.     For  he   had  unspar- 


3l6  THE   SABBATH    IN   HISTORY. 

ingly  and  unrelentingly  been  venting  his  scorn  and  abuse 
against  them  as  a  class  in  public,  whereby  their  minds 
must  have  been  odiously  excited  and  imbittered  against 
him.  In  the  causes  of  all  the  other  accused  Jewish  Chris- 
tian professors  after  him,  however,  it  may  reasonably  be 
supposed  that  they  exhibited  the  spirit  of  mild  judgment, 
for  which  they  are  known  from  authentic  sources. 

That  they  did  possess  and  ordinarily  bring  to  bear  this 
quality,  is  testified  in  many  places  of  the  extensive  Rab- 
binical writings,  as  well  as  by  the  notable  account  of 
Josephus,  in  Antiquities,  xiii.  lo,  6.  We  propose,  in  the 
following,  to  adduce  two  more  relative  points  of  confirma- 
tion. 

First,  we  refer  to  Gamaliel's  reported  interference  in 
behalf  of  the  apostles  at  the  conjuncture  of  their  alleged 
second  persecution  (Acts  v.  17-42).  As  to  the  criticism  on 
this  whole  account,  we  have  to  direct  the  reader  to  Baur 
and  Edward  Zeller  in  their  respective  treatises,  'Paul' 
and  '  The  Contents  of  Acts.'  These  authors  put  forth  very 
strong  arguments  against  the  genuineness  of  Gamaliel's 
speech,  one  of  which  is  the  glaring  anachronism  regarding 
Theudas.  There  is,  indeed,  no  gainsaying  the  mythical  char- 
acter of  that  entire  narrative  of  Acts.  And  yet  it  strikes 
us  as  proper — to  negatively  use  Baur's  verdict — that  "Gama- 
liel should  not  be  given  up."  We  mean,  not  wholly.  We 
aver  that  it  is  not  at  all  unlikely  that  the  apostles  were,  not 
only  twice  but  even  more  often,  brought  to  Jewish  justice 
to  answer  for  their  wonder-working  in  the  '  name  '  of  Jesus, 
and  otherwise  for  teaching  their  doctrines  about  him. 
Accordingly,  though  criticism  finds  the  relative  report  pro- 
duced in  Acts  deformed  by  repellent  mazes  of  fiction  and 
exaggeration,  its  essence  at  least  commends  itself  to  our 
acceptance.  We  hold,  therefore,  that  it  is  safe  enough  to 
retain  as  authentic  the  bare  notice  of  Gamaliel's  interces- 
sion, which  may  be  put  down  as  having  occurred  at  some 
meeting  of  the  Synhedrin  before  which  the  apostles  were 
cited  :  so  far  at  least,  that  he  put  in  for  them  a  determined 
advice  of  '  nolle  prosequi,'  and  this  from  his  moderate  sec- 
tarian tendency  in  judgment. 

As  to  Zeller's  objection  to  assuraing  such  moderation  in 
Gamaliel,  on  the  ground  of  the  general  hostile  attitude  of 
the  Pharisees  toward  Jesus,  it  is,  we  suggest,  easily  lifted 
by  our  above  remark,  that  the  cause  of  Jesus  was  an  excep- 
tional one.  His  other  objection  that,  as  Paul  who  was  a 
disciple  of  Gamaliel  had,  before  his  conversion,  persecuted 
the  Christians,  it  cannot  be  perceived  that  this  teacher  of 
his  was  so  tolerant  as  he   is   represented    in    the  account  of 


THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY.  317 

Acts,  is  very  slender,  indeed.  Is  it  conclusive,  we  ask,  that, 
because  Paul  acted  the  myrmidon  for  the  Sadducean  high- 
priest  and  other  ex-high-priests  of  the  same  persuasion 
(see  Acts  ix.  i,  21),  he  must  have  learned  his  lesson  of  per- 
secuting the  Christians  from  his  teacher  Gamaliel.''  If  it 
were,  we  would  surely  also  be  entitled  to  draw  from  the 
fact — if  it  be  at  all  a  fact — that  he  had  formerly  attended 
the  latter's  school,  the  ultimate  consequence  that  his  later 
fierce  antagonism  to  the  Mosaic  Law  had  its  mainspring  in 
the  theories  propounded  by  the  same  theological  instructor. 
But  that  such  consequence  would  be  the  height  of  absurdity, 
will  readily  be  allowed  by  every  judicious  reader. 

Our  second  point  of  confirmation  of  the  reputed  judicial 
fairness  and  clemency  of  the  Pharisees,  we  educe  from 
Josephus'  relation  of  the  condemnation  of  James  the  Just 
and  some  others,  in  Ant.  xx.  9,  i,  which  we  have  already 
before  surveyed  at  length  as  to  James.  This  relation  is  to 
us  most  worthy  of  serious  notice.  It  offers,  if  rightly  con- 
strued and  understood,  another  important  testimony  that 
the  Pharisees  were  indeed  possessed  of  that  noble  quality. 
On  the  criticism  of  Baur  and  Zeller,  both  of  whom  assume 
in  it  a  Christian  gloss,  it  is  beside  our  present  purpose  to 
enter.  What  we  wish  to  bring  out  here  is,  that  Josephus 
meant  by  those  who  reprobated  the  sanguinary  act  of  the 
Synhedrin  convened  by  the  high-priest  and  president, 
Ananus,  no  other  class  than  the  Pharisees.  He  says  (  we 
give  it  in  our  own  translation,  having  to  reject  Whiston's 
on  grounds  to  be  hereafter  stated):  "But  those  who 
seemed  the  most  equitable  of  the  citizens,  and  exact  with 
regard  to  the  laws,  bore  that  matter  ill,  etc."  The  Greek 
original  of  "  exact  "  is  "  akribeis."  This  epithet  appears  to 
us  to  point  unmistakably  to  the  Pharisees.  Josephus  uses 
the  noun  of  the  same  etymological  stem  when  speaking  of 
this  sect  in  Ant.  xvii.  2,  4,  as  "  valuing  themselves  highly 
on  the  exactness  as  to  the  Law  of  their  fathers,"  and  does 
so  likewise  in  '  Life,'  sect.  38,  when  he  characterizes  Simon, 
the  son  of  the  before-noted  Gamaliel,  as  being  "  of  the 
Phariseic  sect,  who  seem  to  be  distinguished  from  the  other 
people  by  the  exactness  in  the  ancestral  customs"  (or 
"  laws").  In  view  of  this  double  recurrence  of  this  epithet 
in  connection  with  the  Pharisees,  we  reckon  it  most  proba- 
ble that  it  prevailed  in  Josephus'  mind  and  was,  as  it  were, 
stereotyped  with  him  in  his  reflections  on  this  sect.  The 
same  combination,  we  assume,  he  had  before  his  mind  when 


(13) 


3l8  THE   SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

speaking  of  those  "exact  with  regard  to  the  Laws,''  who 
condemned  the  action  of  Ananus'  court.  It  was  the  Phari- 
sees whom  he  here  thought  of.  They,  were,  indeed,  best 
marked  bj^  their  exactness  in  the  laws. 

Yet  this  exactness  is  not,  as  Whiston  renders  it,  in  Life, 
with  "  accurate  knowledge," and  in  Antiquities,  with  "exact 
skill,"  but  an  exactness  alike  in  the  understanding  and 
practice  of  both  the  written  and  oral  laws  of  Israel.  We 
even  prefer  to  think  that  the  point  of  view  of  the  exact 
religious  practice  of  the  Pharisees  predominated  in  Josephus' 
mind  on  noting  the  peculiarity  of  this  sect.  For  they,  in 
truth,  stood  out  for  their  punctiliousness  in  religious  observ- 
ances, in  especial  those  of  ceremonial  purity,  the  tithes,  and 
the  Sabbatic  year.  But  whether  or  not  he  alluded  rather 
to  their  exactness  in  the  observance  of  the  Jewish  cere- 
monial, thus  much  is  sure  beyond  any  shadow  of  doubt, 
that  it  at  least  formed  part  of  his  thought  when  reflecting 
on  the  Pharisees.  It  is  accordingly  imperative  not  to  con- 
strue that  epithet  in  the  only  meaning  of  exactness  in  the 
knowledge  of  Israel's  laws,  as  Whiston  erroneously  does. 
What  we  have  yet  to  notice  as  most  curious  in  this  trans- 
lator, is  his  awkward  and  misleading  version  in  the  passage 
at  issue,  in  Ant.  xx.  9,  i.  He  gives  it :  "But  as  for  those 
who  seemed  the  most  equitable  of  the  citizens,  and  such  as 
were  the  most  uneasy  at  the  breach  of  the  laws,  they  dis- 
liked what  was  done."  Evidently  is  the  second  clause  of 
this  translated  sentence  to  carry  the  sense,  that  the  persons 
spoken  of  were  a  different  class  from  the  equitable  ones  of 
its  first  part.  Yet  the  Greek  original  does  not  in  the 
remotest  way  intimate  the  purport  which  Whiston  has 
imputed  to  it,  viz.,  "  the  most  uneasy  at  the  breach  of  the 
laws."  All  Josephus'  respective  words  in  the  original  are  : 
"  exact  with  regard  to  the  laws."  There  is  actually  no 
mention  of  "  the  most  uneasy  at  the  breach." 

To  resume,  we  would  suggest,  especially  on  the  strength 
of  the  just  reviewed  remarkable  passage  in  Josephus,  that 
the  Pharisees  were  in  all  the  inquisitory  cases  of  Jewish 
Christians  after  Jesus — save,  perhaps,  in  those  of  Hellenistic 
defiers — not  minded  to  severe  measures  being  employed 
against  them.  And  with  the  Pharisees,  that  is,  the  pious 
doctors  of  the  Law  and  their  disciples,  who  were  in  the 
apostolic  period,  as  likewise  afterwards,  mainly  divided 
into  the  schools  of  Shammai  and  Hillel,  we  may  safely 
range  the  bulk  of  the  Jewish  people.  For  the  same  his- 
torian delivers  also  this  information,  that  "the  Pharisees 
have  the  multitude  of  their  side  "  (Ant.  xiii.  10,  6). 


EXCURSUS  D. 


The  summary  treatment  of  the  apostates  in  the  time  of 
the  Syrian  persecution  by  Mattathias  and  his  son  Judas, 
cannot  well  be  held  out  as  counter-proofs.  For  in  those 
days  of  the  remorseless  rule  of  idolatrous  Syria,  in  which 
the  religious  susceptibility  of  the  pious  was,  for  the 
enormous  national-religious  infidelity  that  had  crept  into 
the  Jewish  community,  driven  to  the  sorest  tension,  a  regu- 
lar institution  of  proceedings  by  the  legally  constituted 
courts  was  scarcely  to  be  expected  ;  though  there  is,  on 
the  other  hand,  no  evidence  whatever  that  the  zealous 
leaders  and  pious  avengers  had  not,  in  the  chastisement  of 
those  malefactors,  acted  by  authority  and  concurrence  of 
the  Senate.  That  such  a  supreme  council  existed  in  that 
period,  is  to  be  gathered  from  2  Mace.  iv.  44  ;  compare  also 
ib.  xi.  27,  and,  for  the  reign  of  Antiochus  the  Great,  Ant. 
xii.  3,  3- 

Of  a  different  character  is,  however,  the  proposition  in 
the  Mishnah.  Synhedrin  ix.  6,  that  against  certain  trans- 
gressors individual  religious  zealots — of  the  type  of 
Phineas  ;  see  Numb.  xxv.  6-8 — may  get  up  to  visit  on  them 
a  prompt  infliction  of  death.  One  of  the  offences  named 
there  as  coming  under  this  head  is,  blasphemy  of  God, 
aggravated  by  a  resort  to  polytheistic  sorcery. 

It  appears  to  us  as  very  probable  that  the  author  of  the 
Mishnah  has  incorporated  this  proposition,  which  at  the 
first  glance  contradicts  the  traditional  leniency  of  judgment 
of  the  Pharisees  (Ant.  xiii.  10,  6),  as  a  transmitted  point 
of  law,  having  for  its  historical  background  the  days  when 
those  who  had  assumed  the  title  Kannaim  "  zealots  "  were 
flourishing. 

Waiving  the  question  as  to  the  exact  point  of  time  when 
these  zealots,  the  revolutionary  haters  of  the  Roman 
government,  as  whose  head  Judas  of  Galilee  is  known  in 
history,  first  adopted  this  their  title,  we  may  state  thus 
much  for  certain  that  it  was  largely  in  vogue  with  the 
increase  of  those  revolutionists  styled  Sicarii.  This  was 
under  the  procurator  Festus  ;  see  Josephus,  Ant.  xx.  8,  10. 
Yet  the  existence  of  the  zealots  as  a  set  of  desperate 
anti-Roman  insurrectionists  is  surely  to  be  put  on  a  much 
earlier  date.  Now  as  to  those  Sicarii  who  were  without 
doubt  only  a  faction  of  the  "  zealots,"  we   have  to  say  that 


320  THE    SABBATH    IN    HISTORY. 

their  many  acts  ot  extreme  violence  were,  judging  by  the 
account  of  Josephus  (Wars  vii.  8,  i).  committed  only  against 
those  of  their  countrymen  supposed  to  be  willing  and  ready 
to  tamely  submit  to  the  Romans.  Their  view,  also  stated 
by  that  historian,  was,  that  such  were  false  brethren,  "  not 
differing  at  all  from  foreigners"  (heathens).  In  their  intense, 
exorbitant  patriotism  they  denounced  all  such  temporizing 
fellow-religionists  asNochrim,  "heathen  foreigners."  Their 
ultimate  motive,  misdirected  as  it  surely  must  appear,  was 
to  avenge  what  they  held  to  be  a  national  apostasy,  which 
at  the  same  time  implied  to  them — really  or  only  pretend- 
edly — a  religious  apostasy,  a  fraternization  with  the  "  sons 
of  alien  gods"  (comp.  Mai.  ii.  ii). 

According  to  the  foregoing  we  may  reasonably  assume 
that  the  author  of  that  Mishnah  had  in  view  and  re-echoed 
an  occasional  lynch  practice  resorted  to  in  the  excited  days 
of  terror  which  those  Sicarii  had  caused.  Possibly  he 
thought  of  the  whole  period  of  the  Gaulonite  revolutionists, 
that  is,  from  the  second  decade  of  the  first  century  C.  E. 
till  beyond  the  ruin  of  the  Temple,  along  which  time 
exemplary  lynch  law,  in  the  cases  enumerated  there,  was 
held  applicable. 

That  reminiscences  of  actual  occurrences  of  this  kind  of 
self-assumed  justice  underlie  that  Mishnah,  would  appear 
to  us  from  its  additional  mention  of  priestly  lynch  law, 
though,  too,  only  in  the  form  of  a  proposition.  This  certainly 
points  to  the  Temple  times.  The  author  must  accordingly 
have  referred  to  the  period  in  which  the  Synhedrin  flour- 
ished as  the  constitutional  supreme  power  of  the  nation. 
There  are,  then,  even  from  this  period,  looming  forth  some 
indications  of  self-constituted  power  of  single  religious 
zealots  to  inflict  death  on  certain  offenders,  reflecting  tem- 
porary departures  from  the  norm  of  regular  Synhedrial 
trials  ! 

Whether  by  the  "zealots"  of  the  Mishnah  the  real  Sicarii 
of  Josephus  are  meant,  or  in  general  merely  Phineas-like 
enthusiasts  for  the  purity  of  religion,  at  any  rate  will  the 
supposition  that  occasional  lynch  justice  was  not  entirely 
foreign  to  the  Jews  of  the  first  century  C.  E.,  find  a  fair 
support  by  that  Rabbinical  paragraph. 


«  o    o  A  '7  n 


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